What The Salem Witch Trials Can Teach Us About Climate Change

Image; Takver from Australia

Imagine your community is suffering economic hardships, primarily the result of negligence from elites. They have gotten you into several ill-timed wars and have mismanaged the economy.

Worse, an ecological disaster has exacerbated these problems, and many are going hungry as a result.

These crises — again, the development of your elite’s incompetence — cause an influx of immigrants to “pour” into your surrounding community. And suddenly, tensions that were never great to begin with get a whole lot more tumultuous. Leaders can’t seem to agree on anything, and the political apparatus grinds to a halt.

It’s in this moment, when everything is going to shit that some elites start to convince long-term inhabitants to feel that the problem is a marginalized other. A group that is seemingly weak but all-powerful at the same time and must be stopped at any cost.

It might sound like I am talking about the political dysfunction of the current era and the various moral panics against immigrants, queer people, and people of color, but everything I have said can also describe the moral panic that led to the Salem Witch Trials.

A history that sadly is all too relevant in the modern era.

The chaos before the panic

The Salem Witch Trials (1692–93 CE) are one of American history’s most infamous moral panics. By its end, hundreds of people were accused — and 19 were hanged, one pressed by rocks, and at least four died while imprisoned — for the supposed crime of practicing witchcraft and being in league with the devil.

Books have been written about the ups and downs of these trials — and truthfully, there were many contributing factors: petty small-town politics, a narcissistic grifter caught in the middle of a budget debate, a financial crisis, and even climate change (I encourage people to check out the podcast Remarkable Providences if you want to listen to a good recap).

Yet, from my perspective, we have to center these trials on the horrors of colonial life. Early colonists endured many hardships, including harsh weather, smallpox, and, most unmistakably, war. In particular, King William’s War (1688–1697 CE)— sometimes referred to as the First French and Indian War — was a costly military conflict between the British colonists and France’s indigenous allies that not only took place during the trials but also in Southern New England and Maine, very close to Salem’s borders.

Over decades, thousands died in these conflicts, and, more to the point, many of those who lived through them found themselves moving away — some to the Salem region. As Rosie Lesso writes in The Collector:

“Refugees fled from the worst affected areas in New York, Quebec and Nova Scotia into wider communities including Salem. This influx of new people put the small village of Salem under immense strain as the fight for limited resources turned bitter.”

It cannot be understated how the trauma of this war — one the English colonists were at the time losing — would impact the psychology of many of the trial’s participants (and victims). In Susan Balée’s review of In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692, she writes:

“A modern reader can’t help but think that posttraumatic stress syndrome must have been rampant in towns like Salem, where the survivors of shattered families and communities came to rest and recover. Emotionally, the Bay Colonists must all have been on edge, their knowledge of an ongoing war always on the borders of their consciousness, just as it was on the borders of their settlements.”

Add to this that the region was engulfed in an ice age (i.e., “the little ice age”) that led to crop failures and food shortages and that the racism of colonists had them associate indigenous Americans with the devil, and you might understand (though certainly not condone) the mania that followed.

The war — which was partly kicked off by English Governor Andros’s decision to raid a New France Trading House in Maine — had a destabilizing effect on the entire New England region. Governor Andros was soon removed in 1689 (two years before the trials) due to his incompetence as well as British politics beyond the scope of this article (see the Glorious Revolution), and that left a power vacuum. The Colony Charter was suspended, and it took an entire year — the year the trials occurred — to establish a court rooted in actual laws.

In the meantime, a Special Court of Oyer and Terminer was established, and unlike the more legally grounded court that would be created a year later, this one admitted “spectral evidence” — i.e., the dreams and visions that were the primary evidence for these “trials.”

Some argue the Salem Witch trials were an inversion of traditional power dynamics because women and girls — i.e., people low on the Puritanical hierarchy — were deciding the lives of their fellow citizens, and some powerful men were caught in the crossfire. But overwhelmingly, many of the trial’s victims were at the bottom of that hierarchy, too. About two-thirds of the executed were women. The median age was 59, and several were impoverished, flaunted puritanical norms by having pre-martial sex, or were on the wrong side of petty town politics.

It’s a critique confusing someone’s ability to gain individual power through “reinforcing the system” with “breaking said system.”

The people who ultimately made the decisions to execute their fellow citizens for frankly bullshit reasons were not the accusers but those men on the Court of Oyer and Terminer — many of whom were responsible for the same bad military decisions made during the war. As Balée continues to summarize:

“Norton concludes that because the colony’s leaders were the same men who presided over the witchcraft trials, ‘they attempted to shift the responsibility for their own inadequate defense of the frontier to the demons of the invisible world, and as a result they presided over the deaths of many innocent people.’”

Their citizens were suffering, and rather than focus on the poor leadership that contributed to this state of affairs; they chose to point the finger at an ethereal enemy far removed from the hellish reality they were responsible for.

What does any of this have to do with climate change?

We exist in an entirely distinct political context from 17th-century America (obviously), but there are similarities. We are likewise in the midst of a financial crisis, political dysfunction is our norm, and a series of bad governance decisions (in our case, surrounding climate change and military interventions) has led to a substantial amount of migration.

We don’t often label the hundreds of thousands of people who have moved from desertifying parts of Latin America, the Hurricane-pounded Gulf Coast, or the wild-fire-prone West Coast as “climate change refugees,” but that’s what they effectively are — people who have been forced to move because of the climate.

An often-cited example comes from the city of Paradise, California, where the infamous Camp Fire in 2018 burned the town to the ground, forcing many of its residents to flee to nearby Chico. As Scott Wilson wrote in the New York Times in August of 2019:

“[Chico], the city of 93,000 people grew to 112,000, a 20 percent population spike, in a matter of hours. The vast majority of the Paradise displaced are still here.”

This type of displacement is happening in cities and towns across America. There have been a lot of estimates on how many people will have to move because of climate change — over 1 billion by 2050, according to one estimate — with tens of millions already moving around the world every year. Thousands of people were displaced inside the United States alone in 2023, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.

Climate change is forcing millions to move, and just like in Salem, we are seeing a sadly predictable cycle where “moral entrepreneurs” (i.e., elites scapegoating the marginalized to maintain the moral order) redirect frustration over the status quo toward vulnerable people such as migrants.

Returning to the example of Chico, the migration had the immediate consequence of flipping the 5–2 left-wing majority in the city council to a 4–3 right-wing majority in 2020. That conservative majority was used to begin increasing the eviction of homeless residents, many former occupants of Paradise (i.e., climate change refugees). This included the 2022 clearing of the Comanche Creek Greenway encampment, which at the time was the largest encampment of unhoused people in the town (roughly 102 people).

This was a decision that many townsfolk were happy with, as anti-homelessness sentiment was and continues to be quite common. As one resident at the encampment remarked a year before the clearing:

“People are always talking bad about us and I’m just like, ‘They don’t even try to understand or they just think that we’re incapable and like disgusting.’”

This situation has not improved since the Supreme Court overturned a lower court restriction on camping bans. These sweeps will most likely increase, not only in California but throughout the US.

We are seeing a pattern across the country where the specter of “lawlessness” is used to demonize migrants, the homeless, and other marginalized identities — themselves often victims of climate change — who are then scapegoated as the source of all of society’s woes. To the point where a presidential nominee for the 2024 election cycle, Donald Trump, incoherently (and falsely) ranted at a debate about immigrants eating dogs and other pets.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating… they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

These kinds of statements are all over conservative media (and even in some right-leaning liberal circles), and they remind me of the accusers at Salem. They feel like visions, imaginary happenings of wrongdoings that moral entrepreneurs can point to as justification for why a certain population must be eliminated. Swap out satan for migrants, and it’s hard to see the difference.

And just like in Salem, this rhetoric is a misdirection to cover up political incompetence. A rise in crime does not correlate with increasing or decreasing police budgets in a given area. Increasing deportations and homeless sweeps do not stop migration that results from financial and climate-based precarity.

The climate is degrading due to negligent policy choices (see Our Leaders’ Solution To Climate Change Is To Pretend Like They Have Solved The Problem) that militarization fails to address, but while removing such scapegoats does nothing to improve our society, to some, it sure feels like it does.

And feelings are what moral panics are all about.

A moral conclusion

I am sure some residents in Salem briefly felt more secure, thinking the devil was being uprooted from their community. Dogmatism is a helluva a drug.

But, like any moral panic, the root cause of their problems was not being addressed. The political incompetence of their leaders had made their community less safe, and rather than address the impacts of a looming war and food shortages, their leaders pushed their community to look inward at an unseen enemy, sacrificing innocent people in the process to keep the narrative alive.

Likewise, it’s worrying that our leaders are primarily concerned with militarizing our cities, towns, and borders — using the specter of law and order to do so— and not doing a damn thing to address the root causes of migration and homelessness.

Instead of solving these problems, the solution seems to be to whip up a panic about them — and that’s something not very different from Salem at all.

Why Do We Love Witches Like Esther Finch From ‘Dead Boy Detectives’?

Credit: Netflix

There was just something about the witch Esther Finch (Jenn Lyon) when she strolled onto the screen with her epic black cane and fabulous vocal fry. She just looked cool, literally described by one of the leads as “a sexy witch who smokes a lot. But in a cool way.”

Esther is a witch who steals children, and she is evil for it, but she also just comes off as the kind of person you want to party with. “Hi, I’m Esther,” she says nonchalantly, releasing a puff of smoke from her cigarette as she introduces herself to one of our leads. She is indifferent and confident all at once, and the viewer cannot help but revel in her awfulness.

Esther is a camp villain that I consider to be an instant classic. And while I do love her entire vibe, it’s worth reflecting on why we love villainous witches like Esther Finch and the not-so-great history behind that obsession.

Something Witchy

Esther is not the first fabulously evil witch out there. I always think of the sea witch Ursula (Pat Carroll) from The Little Mermaid (1989), the main antagonist of the movie, who convinces our lead, Ariel (Jodi Benson), to give up her voice for the chance to walk on land. She is 100% evil, and yet when she sings her musical number Poor Unfortunate Souls, upselling the naive princess on how she’s actually “good,” viewers like me cannot help but be won over by her confidence (at least a little bit).

Maybe your mind goes to the original Hocus Pocus (1993), where the villainous Sanderson sisters — who are also trying to steal children — say fabulous lines that I still repeat to this day. Perhaps you are a fan of The Witch (Krysten Ritter:) in Nightbooks (2021) or the dozens of other adaptations of Hansel & Gretel.

Esther is introduced in the show quite early. She comes across our dead boys Edwin Payne (George Rexstrew) and Charles Rowland (Jayden Revri) — the ghost protagonists of the series — on their first case of the pilot. They are tracking down a missing girl and learn that she is being held captive by our witch Esther, who feeds little children to her snake as part of a cruel bargain to remain eternally young and beautiful. “I’m done stealing children under the cloak of night,” she laments in one scene on the ‘unfairness’ of her position. “I wanna take them in broad daylight whenever I want. Is that too much?”

The boys stop her from feeding the child to her snake, and this angers Esther so much that she whips up an elaborate method of killing our leads. “A revenge starter kit,” she says gleefully to the owner of a magical antique store, setting the stage for a season of dark shenanigans.

Yet her awfulness is not just celebrated but deconstructed. We learn that she had an abusive husband who cheated on her. And so she prayed to Lilith, the Goddess of witches, to give her immortality. This deal, however, did not give Esther eternal beauty, and her vanity (not her past) leads her to hurt tons of other women (and girls) in the process.

Esther ultimately suffers as a result of this selfishness. Lilith is convinced by the magic user Crystal Palace (Kassius Nelson) to take back her immortality, pleading to Lilith: “You’re supposed to be the Goddess of wronged women, right? This witch, she took your gift, and then she killed hundreds of little girls to stay young! Who gets justice for them?”

And Lilith listens. She comes to Esther’s house and drags her to hell.

We see this sense of cosmic justice in a lot of media when it comes to our fabulous witches. Ursula may sing one of the best songs in the Disney Canon, but she is still speared by the bow of a ship. The witches in Hocus Pocus explode. The witch in Hansel & Gretel is burned alive in an oven.

This sense of punishment is partially a holdover from the moralism of the Hays Code and Television Code (and arguably Christianity more broadly), which required that media never reward villainous behavior. That message still lingers today, decades after both codes were repealed. When awful people are the villains in a narrative, viewers generally expect them to receive some kind of comeuppance.

That’s probably a fine standard if your villain’s motivations satisfy contemporary notions of unethicalness. I’m not losing sleep over Ursla, the slave trafficker, or Esther, the child murderer, getting an unhappy ending.

Yet, it bears emphasizing why certain archetypes are often villainous. A lot of these fabulous witches are coded as evil because of our history. I have talked about it before, but our demonization of witches is the result of the deadly moral panics in Europe and the Americas. Witches were purposefully associated with Satan and became societal folk devils. It’s those purges that are why we now so often associate witchcraft with evil today. As I write in The Problematic Christian Propaganda in Disney’s ‘Hocus Pocus’:

“From the 14th to 17th century, it’s estimated that somewhere between 40,000 to 50,000 “witches” were killed (though some older estimates place this far higher), and overwhelmingly these victims were women. Some theorize that these purges were because witchcraft competed with Christianity’s role in explaining the world. Others claim that it was a way for the Catholic Church to compete with its emerging protestant competitors (i.e., we kill your witches better than the other guy).

There are many competing theories, but regardless of the overall justification, assuming a singular one even exists at all, Christian officials took advantage of gender inequities to kill tens of thousands or possibly even hundreds of thousands of people. It’s important to note that these practices have still not technically died. Thanks to imperialism, Christianity was spread all over the world, and witch hunts have been reported in places as far-ranging as Papua New Guinea and Sub-Sahara Africa.”

In other words, we associate witches with evil for a reason.

A witchy conclusion

Maybe that’s why I can’t help but love Esther and Ursula and the thousands of fabulous witches out there on the silver screen and page. They are awful as much because of what they represent as for their evil deeds.

The Dead Boy Detectives plays with this expectation as Lilith is the Goddess of wronged women. The narrative is much more about helping other women (and punishing those who wrong them) than it is a demonization of witches specifically. The character who ultimately defeats Esther, Crystal Palace, is a powerful magic in her own right, and that is a beautiful message to end on.

It’s not evil for women to practice magic — it’s how they wield it.

Netflix’s ‘The Decameron’: An Eat The Rich Satire

Image; John William Waterhouse (1849–1917)

Spoilers for Netflix’s The Decameron

The Decameron is an old collection of stories dating back to the 1300s. Written by Giovanni Boccaccio in Medieval Italy, it follows a tale-within-a-tale structure similar to texts like One Thousand and One Nights. Ten young nobles hiding out in a villa in the countryside from the plague in Florence tell each other stories — many based on pre-existing folklore and myths — to pass the time.

The Decameron, published in a more accessible Tuscan vernacular opposed to Latin, was well-received by the public for its cutting and lewd commentary on everything from female sexuality to the clergy. The latter topic was not appreciated by the Vatican, which attempted to ban this text in the ensuing centuries.

And so showrunner Kathleen Jordan is drawing from this rich history in her loose adaptation, also titled The Decameron. She tells an equally lewd dark comedy that cuts the tale-within-a-tale structure to focus solely on the drama of the nobles and servants at the Villa.

In doing so, she inverts the upstairs-downstairs dynamic seen in shows such as Downton Abbey (2010–2015) and instead brings these two classes directly into conflict.

They all fall down

The show’s setting is similar to its written counterpart. The Black Death has swept through the city of Florence, where our leads are from, and they have fled to the Villa Santa to escape it. The plague has acted as a great leveler (killing nobles and common folk alike), which means that the “normal” social order is on the brink of collapse — at least temporarily.

When our leads travel to Villa Santa, the nobles do not bring an entourage of staff and family members because most have died.

Instead, they opt to mostly travel in noble-servant pairs. Each pair represents something illuminating about class dynamics: mainly how to bridge the class divide, how to ignore it, and what happens when resentments boil over too high.

For the noble Tindaro (Douggie McMeekin) and his doctor Dioneo (Amar Chadha-Patel), their relationship is literally toxic. Tindaro is an annoying pedantic blowhard who bloviates about the Roman Empire and the duplicitousness of women. He is also a hypochondriac. So, to keep the gold flowing and Tindaro manageable, Dioneo, who I would charitably call a f@ckboy, poisons Tindaro in a Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSP) kind of situation.

As the social order in the Villa breaks down, however, Dioneo increasingly does not care about even the pretense of tending to his master. When a new faction takes over the Villa and offers Dioneo the right to stay (but not his master, Tindaro), he gladly takes it. Dioneo had no emotional investment in Tindaro, and the moment their financial investment dissolves, they have nothing.

While Tindaro outlasts Dioneo (more out of coincidence than anything else), he doesn’t survive the series. He ultimately sacrifices himself for the peasants of the Villa, particularly so his “love interest,” Stratilia (Leila Farzad), and her child (Aston Wray) can survive an impending invasion.

Whereas in a different text, such a sacrifice would earn Tindaro confessions of love and admiration from Stratilia, she offers no such genuine confessions, taking his money, offering false praises, and fleeing the Villa.

A similar fate befalls noble Panfilo (Karan Gill), who decides to end his life after his wife, Neifile (Lou Gala), succumbs to the plague. I appreciated Panfilo’s relationship with his wife, which deserves an article in its own right, but for our purposes, it should be noted that he is yet another noble who dies in the text. He tenderly holds his wife’s body as a shield against the invaders, telling his enemies it has the plague, and that gives everyone else enough time to flee.

Never letting go

Now, a fallen noble who doesn’t get a hero’s death is the spoiled Pampinea (Zosia Mamet), who came to Villa Santa hoping to secure a marriage from the late Visconte Leonardo. Her relationship with her servant Misia (Saoirse-Monica Jackson) ends in delicious tragedy as the latter comes to terms with just how cruel Pampinea is.

At first, Misia cares deeply for her master, professing her devotion to her.

Yet Pampinea is a conniving, mentally abusive person who shows utter disregard for Misia. She pushes her servant to do utterly irreprehensible things, such as killing a fellow noble so Pampinea can maintain the illusion of control over the Villa. Misia’s feelings don’t matter to Pampinea, and she makes it quite clear that she will never release Misia from this toxic cycle, saying:

“The way you love me, you love me no matter what I do. It's the greatest gift I've ever known…I will never let you go.”

Shortly after this statement, Misia does the only thing a person backed into a corner by someone with an unequal power dynamic can truly do: she kills Pampinea. Specifically, she traps Pampinea in a barrel and lights it on fire.

From my perspective, Pampinea’s death reads as justice, representing what the outcome is for the upper classes when resentment is never given room to breathe.

Letting go

The only noble protagonist who survives the series is Filomena (Jessica Plummer), alongside her servant Licisca (Tanya Reynolds). This is mainly because Filomena can set her privilege aside.

When we first see Filomena on her way to Villa Santa, we observe an extraordinarily cruel person — so cruel, in fact, that she is unwilling to let her servant Licisca give some bread to a dying man. Filomena and Licisca start to fight physically. Licisca loses it, pushing Filomena off a bridge in, if not an act of self-defense, at the very least, something most viewers can identify with.

Many of us have wanted to push our abusive bosses off a bridge.

This inciting incident allows Licisca to go to the Villa pretending to be Filomena, literally inverting the class dynamics of this pairing. Licisca, playing Filomena, comes to realize how arbitrary the social rules governing the classes are, lamenting: “Why can’t we [live freely]? Men do. They get on just fine behaving like animals.”

The “real” Filomena inevitably makes her way to the Villa, haggard and bruised from her long travels. However, she is not perceived as a noblewoman by the people of the Villa but as a servant. Filomena is forced to pretend to be Licisca — to take on the role she so callously abused when her position was reversed.

There is one funny scene where Filomena pleads to Pampinea to accept her. “I spoke the truth,” she begs. “I was not a servant until the day I arrived at Villa Santa…So I ask you, as a friend and a fellow noblewoman, to help me break Licisca’s spell.” Pampinea ignores her pleas because she feels awkward about the situation.

It’s not important to her whether Filomena is actually a servant or a noble— merely that someone is playing the role.

Filomena learns to set her ego aside, albeit under the constant threat of death. She opens up to Licisca until there are no secrets between them, leading to reconciliation. It takes a lot to reach that point, and Filomena has to lose everything to do so, but she does get there.

Happily ever after-ish

The Decameron is a show about peasants and nobles clashing during the breakdown of this medieval society’s social order.

One by one, most of our noble leads die, and the one who remains learns to be a little less rigid in her thinking. The series ends with Filomena and the other servants sitting in a glade, happily entertaining each other with stories and fake food, replicating the original Decameron, sans the nobles. There is no hierarchy left between them — at least in that moment.

This story of plague, class differences, and debauchery ends on a very hopeful note — one I found refreshing in our uncertain world, with class dynamics only slightly removed from our medieval ancestors of yore.

Americans Have Been Panicking About Queer People Since Before America Existed

Brooks, Elbridge Streeter, 1846–1902

As a trans person, I have watched in horror as the latest “groomer” panic has enfolded. I have observed moral entrepreneurs such as Matt Walsh and Libs of TikTok’s Chaya Raichik whip up a frenzy against queer people based on lies about my community, alleging that we are all child predators.

I have spent a lot of time refuting these allegations over the last few years. And as I have learned more and more about history, it’s become abundantly clear that this is not a unique moment— neither in queer history nor the history of moral panics more broadly.

In fact, the seed for this latest panic is rooted in a type of thinking that existed even before the United States did as a concept.

“Before” Queerness

The definition of a moral panic is debated in the literature, as many phrases tend to be. Scholar Chas Critcher has argued that a moral panic is a term that should be exclusively reserved by elites who reinforce the status quo or, more specifically, “dominant regulatory practices.” Elites do this by scapegoating outsiders and otherized groups as “folk devils” who personify all that is wrong with society.

How long have we been turning queer people into folk devils?

The traditional answer is the tail end of the 19th century. There is a familiar story told in academic circles that before the advent of modern biology and psychology, homosexual acts were lumped into the conversation surrounding sodomy (or “buggery”) laws, which banned “nonprocreative sex” such as bestiality, anal sex between men and women, and for our purposes, sex between men and between women (although the later was rarely acknowledged in these early laws).

The enforcement of these laws in the early American period was allegedly rare and fell harder on bestiality than between the sexes. As Margot Canaday writes in her book review of William Eskridge’s Dishonorable Passions:

Punishment–which included death–was draconian, but the laws were very rarely enforced. Historians know of less than ten executions for sodomy throughout the seventeenth century. Of those few, almost all involved assault or sex with animals. These laws were not directed in any particular way toward homosexuality. Indeed, they couldn’t be–the idea that there was a type of person who was a homosexual didn’t even emerge until the late nineteenth century, a result of urbanization, industrialization and the development of medical/sexological discourse.

And so if the concept of homosexuality, transness, and queerness doesn’t exist, can you even have a panic around it?

Yet this narrative is harder to square away the moment you expand your analysis to non-white people and non-cis-gendered people. Before colonialism and the (cultural) genocides that followed, Indigenous Americans had a diverse array of gender presentations. And from what I can tell, same-sex relationships were often normalized, too. Though, it’s important to note that they did not operate under the same Western framework of queerness.

This fluidity with sex and gender was a reality settlers hated. As Pierre Liette writes bigotedly in 1702 of Two-Spirit people amongst the Indigenous Miami in modern-day Illinois:

The sin of sodomy prevails more among them than in any other nation…There are men who are bred for [the purpose of sleeping with other men] from their childhood. When they are seen frequently picking up the spade, the spindle, the axe, but making no use of the bow and arrows, as all the other small boys do, they are girt with a piece of leather or cloth which envelops them from the belt to the knees, a thing all the women wear. Their hair is allowed to grow and is fastened behind the head. They also wear a little skin like a shoulder strap passing under the arm on one side and tied over the shoulder on the other. They are tattooed on their cheeks like the women and also on the breast and the arms, and they imitate their accent, which is different from that of the men. They omit nothing that can make them like the women. There are men sufficiently embruted to have dealings with them on the same footing.

This settler-colonial hatred of this tribe’s acceptance of two-spirit folks didn’t stop merely with disgust. All throughout this period, colonists and missionaries were trying to destroy this fluidity and impose a rigid binary onto the indigenous people of the Americas. In the words of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, recapping one of the more heinous examples of anti-queerness in Canada in her book, As We Have Always Done:

Joseph-François Lafitau was a French Jesuit missionary and ethnologist working in Rotinonhseshá:ka territory in the early part of the 1700s. In his major and often cited work published in Paris in 1724…Lafitau ‘congratulates’ missionaries for ‘suppressing’ Indigenous queer relationships. He describes the missionaries’ success in prompting many queer Indigenous people and their relations to see their identity as ‘shameful.’ He was pleased to report that after seventy-five years of missionary work, people once ‘regarded as extraordinary men,’ had now, ‘come to be looked on, even by the Indians, with scorn.’

If moral panics are framed as turning a particular group of people into folk devils so elites can uphold the moral order, then anti-queer moral panics were a foundational part of the cultural genocides against Indigenous people in the Americas.

And as we shall soon see, it doesn’t seem as though such panics started and ended with Indigenous Americans.

The Case of Thomas(ine) Hall

Gender norms were strictly enforced in the colonies, with there being rigid domains for men and women. Indentured servant Thomas(ine) Hall is often cited as an example of a possible intersex person in the early colonial period whose “confusing” gender presentation (i.e., transitioning back and forth between male and female identities) became a scandal among their community for “flaunting” traditional gender roles.

Part of the complication was that their owner, John Tyos, was planning to sell Thomas(ine)’s contract to community member John Atkins, and their gender would have had a huge impact on the work they could do and their overall price.

Furthermore, the specter of buggery laws played directly into this panic when it was rumored that Thomas(ine) may have had sex with a maid. If they were a man, legally speaking, then they would be charged with fornication (i.e., premarital sex), but not as women, as sex between women was then not recognized by the state of Virginia’s buggery laws.

Three women inspected Thomas(ine) and determined they were a male, but their owner, John Tyos, disagreed — potentially to avoid the scandal of a fornication trial. The matter became increasingly more hostile, with much of the community coming to weigh in on the issue of their gender. Thomas(ine) was inspected during their sleep, in the middle of the road, and even had a documented instance of (at least one) hate crime for “pretending” to be a woman.

Ultimately, the issue was litigated by the Quarter Court in Virginia in 1629, ruling them to be “both and neither” binary gender. Thomas(ine) was legally required to wear clothing that had elements of both sexes, which was undoubtedly meant to shame them for their behavior. They dropped out of the historical record immediately after, so we do not know how they (or their community) reacted to this punishment.

It’s important to note that if Thomas(ine) had been convicted for their unconfirmed “dalliance” with a maid, it would not have been considered sodomy or buggery but fornication, i.e., premarital sex. It’s only because of their unapologetic nature that we have such an example of colonial queerness in the first place. As historian Richard Godbeer writes of identifying queer relationships in such trials, “We rarely glimpse in the surviving court records any feelings that defendants may have had for one another.”

Even when we do have a historical record, we often have to further parse the flawed assumptions of the colonizer historian documenting it. Plenty of queer people are persecuted and then forgotten, their deaths filed away under something else — if they are filed away at all.

Yet as we see with the Thomas(ine) case, panics over queer sexuality and gender did indeed happen in colonial America.

A panicky conclusion

I have focused on the period before the formation of the United States because it says something important about the present moment.

Anti-queerness was here in the beginning, and it never went away.

As history progressed, my fellow queer people would come to be victims of a vicious healthcare system that would castrate and lobotomize them. They would be lynched and demonized so severely that being open about their identities would get them fired, evicted, or worse.

Yet, this current trans panic we are experiencing has its roots in the settler-colonialism foundational to this country’s development. Our nation’s hatred of queer people was an outgrowth of the gender binary and heterosexism that was (and continues to be) rigidly enforced by both those on the periphery of the colonial project (i.e., Indigenous people) and those inside of it.

This history does not justify people’s hatred of queer people but rather is my attempt to contextualize just how intertwined anti-queerness is with settler-colonialism — and it’s both that we need to eradicate.

‘Delicious in Dungeon’ Is the Gayest Ungay Show I Have Ever Seen

Image; Studio Trigger

If you haven’t seen the fantasy dungeon crawler and cooking show Delicious in Dungeon (2024-present) or Danjon Meshi, based on Ryoko Kui’s manga of the same name, I highly recommend it.

Adapted by Studio Trigger, the fantastic minds behind Little Witch Academia (2017) and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (2022), the story follows a group of adventurers descending to the lowest levels of a dungeon to rescue a fallen party member in the thrall of a mad mage. The show has a fascinating mystery for those who like such intrigue, and it also has good writing and incredible humor.

Anything that brings emotional weight to whether a meal uses Griffin or Hippogriff meat is solid writing in my book.

The energy is also very queer. There is a tenderness to how these characters interact that is so unlike a lot of action and adventure media, and that frankly speaks to how a lot of heterosexual characters lack the emotional connection and empathy so crucial to much of queer media.

The gay women

For me, this show just instantly gave off queer energy. I would see a frame of characters Marcille Donato (Emily Rudd/Sayaka Senbongi) and Falin Touden (Lisa Reimold/Saori Hayami) blushing in a bathtub or an introductory scene of all our leads cuddling next to one another and immediately “get” queer vibes.

Image; Studio Trigger

I am not the only one who thinks this way. The queer fandom surrounding this show is honestly intense, and a quick internet search will reveal tons of queer fan art, merch, memes, and fan videos. As The Geeky Waffle writer Hope Mullinax wrote over discovering one favorite scene in the Marcille-Falon fandom:

“As a queer woman myself, I found it relatable to a character I didn’t even know. It was that one moment that made me go, ‘Okay, I’m going to watch this show.’”

One thing you will notice is how unexploitative Delicious in Dungeon feels. The female characters are depicted to be more than just objects for a male power fantasy. Returning to the bath scene we mentioned earlier, what is so refreshing is the lack of exploitation. As Jade King writes in their article for The Gamer:

“The bath scene is a common occurrence in anime and manga, often used to band all the female characters together in a steamy room filled with convenient angles designed to show off boobs and butts. It has been a staple for decades, so when Dungeon Meshi puts two of its most beloved characters in a room together, your average joe could be blamed for expecting the same to happen here. But it doesn’t, instead subverting our expectations by putting a deliberate focus on the words and body language of Marcille and Falin as they celebrate a chance to spend more of their lives together, relieved they’ve both survived.”

In essence, the narrative treats its women characters as people, not objects to be ogled over.

The portrayal of women in Delicious in Dungeon contrasts with a lot of anime, particularly Shonen (e.g., Dragon Ball Z, Naruto, etc.) or the even more mature Seinen anime (e.g., Ghost in the Shell, Parasyte, etc.), where a lot of the women in them are framed exploitatively. Women characters will have frequent boob and ass shots, and pervert characters like Sanji from One Piece will be around to harass one or all of them.

Even in Shoujo anime, which is theoretically geared toward young girls, issues of representation are not uncommon. The writer Kadesh Lauridsen had this to say about the femme classic Sailor Moon (1995–2000), which is often heralded for its positive representation:

“While the female representation in Sailor Moon reaches beyond expectations by empowering feminine traits instead of belittling them, this representation is immediately taken away once you realize that the young female protagonists are being exploited sexually. This demonstrates that even when a show has an extremely powerful example of female representation it still has some underlying tones of satisfying its limited male audience.”

For a lot of anime, there is a constant balancing act between empowering female characters and also satisfying the men in the room.

The men

Anime men are often stereotyped as tough. Shonen anime has many oblivious airheads ready to willpower through a situation with eternal optimism (think Monkey D. Luffy from One Piece). Seinen characters often hold a “realistic” pessimism or misanthropy that is portrayed as reserved or cool. Isekai characters (e.g., a genre for characters who are transported to another world) are frequently overpowered to the point of Godhood (see Overlord).

In the words of Myan Mercado in a CBR article on anime stereotypes:

“It’s a rule of thumb that the hero will be the strongest or smartest character in their anime and defeat any antagonist that directly challenges them. They might struggle at first or they might not make the best choices, but they’re the protagonist for a reason. Victory is essentially guaranteed thanks to the ridiculous power scaling trope.”

Of course, these are merely trends, not absolute facts.

This is also not an anime-specific problem. While the tropes surrounding masculinity and femininity in media will vary by medium and culture, it is not uncommon in America for many male protagonists to be overly confident and skilled: that is the template for most action thrillers. James Bond, Jason Bourne, and more are often depicted as reserved and “cool.”

The men in Delicious in Dungeon do not meet this standard mold for action and adventure heroes. The fighter character Laios (Damien Haas/Kentarō Kumagai), arguably the lead, is the opposite of “cool.” His special interest in “cooking monsters” has him so oblivious to situations that he can unknowingly self-sabotage his goals.

There is one painful scene in the episode Harpy/Chimera where Laios learns that someone he thought was his friend has hated him the entirety of their friendship because of the warrior’s inability to pick up on “obvious” social cues.

Laios is not oblivious to the point of being toxic, however. He learns to apologize when he does something wrong and to communicate his feelings, which feels novel for a lot of anime. He is not the only one, either. From the dwarf Senshi (SungWon Cho/Hiroshi Naka) coming to respect the rogue Chilchuck’s (Casey Mongillo/Asuna Tomari) skillsets to the mage Marcille Donato learning to accept that her booksmarts aren’t everything, many episode arcs are about these characters realizing that some assumption they had about their companions is wrong and then apologizing for it.

And that’s what makes this show refreshing. It’s not a role reversal in which the men in the show are subordinate to its female characters, but a world where all genders are treated with a basic level of empathy—a bar that sadly is so far removed from how gender norms are typically depicted in media.

Hence its allegedly queer vibe.

A hungry conclusion

Delicious in Dungeon has the sensibility of a queer show without any openly queer romantic, sexual, or asexual text to support that assumption. While that might change if the text becomes less ambiguous, right now, I think this vibe speaks more to the norms of heterosexual and cisgender characters in film and television being usually so unappealing that some queer people lump the opposite of that binary in with queerness.

Yet queer people do not have a monopoly on emotional intelligence, and Delicious in Dungeon is not the only media that has broken ground on having emotionally well-rounded anime characters. I am a personal fan of Seirei no Moribito (2007) — the story of a woman bodyguard in feudal Japan protecting a prince — but a lot of women writers have been adding to the genre in noteworthy ways for years.

Unless Studio Trigger makes any last-minute surprises in its later seasons (much to Marcille and Falin stan’s glee), it will most likely remain textually “unqueer,” and that’s okay. I am thrilled, more and more, that we are getting examples of men and women being portrayed in emotionally complex ways that are not exploitative or unkind.

It makes such stories utterly delicious in my book.

Amazon’s Anti-Corporate Messaging In ‘The Boys’ Is F@cking Weird

Image; Amazon Prime Video

Amazon’s The Boy’s (2019–2025) has always been a delicious satire. The first season began by introducing viewers to a world where a superhero corporation named Vought International had huge sway over the US government. The company’s superheroes, which served as a de facto private military, were able to kill innocent civilians with relative impunity.

In fact, the superhero A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) having killed protagonist Hughie Campbell’s (Jack Quaid) girlfriend was the inciting incident for our lead’s journey to take down Vought and its fascistic mascot Homelander (Antony Starr).

As the seasons progressed, Vought took over more and more of the US government until, in the latest season, it all but performed an open coup. Homelander, as the head of one of the most powerful corporations on the planet, now has direct sway over the current president, and he is more than prepared to remake America in his image.

As the credits rolled, I had one burning question about this show’s brilliant anti-corporate messaging: who the f@ck does Amazon think it’s kidding?

This show is not a fan of Corporate America

Many critics have been rather quick to point out how The Boys this season parodied the American right’s move toward fascism — much to many real-life far-right commentators’ triggered outrage.

Yet Vought’s monopolistic and corrupt nature is also a running theme on the show—perhaps one of “thee” most prominent themes. In the first season, Vought executive Madelyn Stillwell (Elisabeth Shue) uses Baltimore’s political need for a superhero to extract millions of dollars. “We both know your city needs a hero,” Stillwell pitches to the mayor—a hustle that she is running across the entire country.

From the get-go, it’s evident that Vought’s heroes are simply a product—and not even a very “good” one at that. “Supes” only give Americans the illusion of safety, but these superheroes spend more time filming movies, talk shows and staged “saves” than they do actually helping society. The first season has the hero Starlight (Erin Elair Moriarty) disappointed that Vought has surveillance information better than the US government, and they use it selectively to enact saves that film better on camera. As one guy from Crime Analytics gloats:

“Where and when to find the bad guys. That's what my department does. We vet leads, crunch satellite data, COMP-STAT. Better intel than the police.”

By the time we get to the latest season, the mask has all but slipped, as we are repeatedly shown how much this company hates workers. In one example, our heroes—the black ops group “the boys,” not the supes of Vought—are hiding in a former Vought packaging plant, and it is filled with anti-worker messaging. Supes like Black Noir are juxtaposed with quotes such as “Unions can’t. We can.” or “Every Mother ‘Vought’ To Know…Nothing but the best for my family.”

It’s not subtle.

Vought is a hydra that has stakes in entertainment, pharmaceuticals, the military, and even the press, and it uses that power to routinely dump on the working class. As the coup is nearly coming to fruition in season four, the company puts out a Christmas propaganda video that doesn’t just critique “woke” gay people and other marginalized groups but also those with class consciousness, such as “socialists.”

The show is much more a critique of how corporate America can perpetuate fascism than just one deconstructing fascism alone. Homelander efficiently uses Vought’s resources to take over the US government, and that would not have been possible if the company’s naked pursuit of profit had not already eroded our democratic principles.

Everything Vought can do, Amazon can do better

It’s tough to swallow The Boy’s anti-corporate message alongside the fact that Amazon is, in many ways, a company just as terrible as Vought.

It has also engaged in anti-worker practices such as exploitation and union-busting, with reports as recent as this year of the company engaging in an array of tactics to stop a historic vote in Coventry, UK (e.g., anti-union seminars, hiring surges to dilute the vote, putting up posters with QR codes that, when scanned, sent out automatic emails that canceled the users’ union membership, etc.).

This behavior has been going on for years. I remember driving up to a Fulfillment Center in Baltimore back in 2018 to go on a “tour”—the ones the company had arranged after negative coverage of workers peeing in bottles—and the statements I collected from workers, “off the record,” were horrifying (see Amazon Warehouses: Perfecting The American Plantation). Workers described the company as being so intense that it “[worked] the sweat out of [them].” As one former worker commented on that article:

“On my first day at Amazon in West Columbia my feet were swollen and very painful…The job is painful. [After awhile] I couldn’t even bend over anymore to pick up totes and items that fell off the shelf. Standing up for 10+ hours is extremely difficult.”

The workers I talked to were afraid to organize because they felt like they had few options or that the company would retaliate if they did, but don’t take my word for it; there is a well-documented history of the company “suddenly” starting to terminate employees for minor offenses right after they “just so happen to start union organizing.” The American Prospect has an excellent piece describing how Amazon offloads the management of many of its workers to third-party firms, whose contract it simply terminates if and when workers there ever manage to organize.

And Amazon’s effects are far more wide-reaching than merely being shitty to its workers. Like Vought, the company is also gobbling up a lot of media properties. The most talked about is The Washington Post, which is owned by Nash Holdings and, ultimately, Amazon Chairman and Founder Jeff Bezos. An ownership decision that has undoubtedly shaped the ideological tendencies of that paper. As Robert W. McChesney told Dan Froomkin in the Columbia Journalism Review of Bezos’ stewardship:

“The values of the owner tend to be communicated subtly. [Those who don’t pick up the signals] get weeded out along the way.”

Yet the most significant avenue of media domination is its control of cloud services (AWS). Many providers, even market competitors such as Netflix and Disney+, require AWS on the backend to run their businesses. This fact gives the company a lot of leverage over the overall architecture of the web.

As a result, many media channels are now hosted directly on the Amazon Prime Platform. We are not just talking about entertainment properties such as Crunchyroll or Hallmark, but also the many news programs under Paramount+ (e.g., CBS Evening News and Specials), Discovery+, PBS, and more. This influence on that media is less direct — from what we currently know, Amazon is not censoring Paramount+ overtly — but this concentration does set the stage for a dizzying amount of media being directly managed by the company.

Lastly, the real-life parallels of the far-right, fascistic politicians so deeply criticized on The Boys are ones the company directly supports. Amazon donates to both major political parties every election season, receiving a grade of F on the American Democracy Score Card (via Accountable.US) for backing politicians who directly undermine our democracy, including ones who have supported regressive voting laws, opposed the January 6th investigation, and more.

Furthermore, it doesn’t just pay those politicians to maintain good relations. Amazon has one of the most aggressive lobbying arms in the United States. Most famously, it killed or undermined privacy protections in states nationwide and stopped anti-trust laws from advancing. Author Dana Mattioli has described the company’s culture as so toxic that even some bankers and CEOs of other companies (off the record) have expressed concern about their behavior.

And this is simply the stuff we are aware of. An entertaining part of The Boy’s is to see the “palace intrigue” of what executives at Vought are saying and doing behind the scenes. There are undoubtedly actions happening right now at Amazon we will not learn about until decades after the fact, if ever.

Sans the superheroes, Amazon is Vought. If it could create a Homelander to rule over the world, it would.

A super conclusion

It’s very frustrating to absorb a message about how corporate America can abet fascism and not feel nauseated by the hypocrisy of Amazon, one such fascist corporation, delivering that message. One that was more than willing to place product placements for Amazon packaging and its show, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, inside that alleged critique (see episode Life Among Septics).

Amazon is not the first company to coopt radical messaging for profit. I wrote a piece about Netflix, one of the biggest profiteers of exploitative crime documentaries, producing a critique of that genre while having no intention of changing its behavior (see Can Netflix Critique Itself?). This type of thing happens all the time. The Lego Movie (2014) was about overconsumption despite advertising Legos. The Barbie Movie (2023) is a feminist critique that just so happens to serve as a two-hour+ product placement for a pretty regressive product.

It’s not unusual for a company to finance a work that critiques a problem it helped cause.

I like The Boys. It’s going to be up there in my end-of-the-year rankings. I just hope that as we enjoy this anti-fascist and anti-corporate work, we do not lose sight of the problems coming from its very troublesome messenger.

I Get Why Adults Like the Kids Show ‘Bluey’ Now

Image; KONTRA.PKC

The first time I knew I would love the children’s animated cartoon Bluey (2018-present) was watching the season one episode, Hospital. The two anthropomorphic dogs, Bingo and the titular Bluey, were play-acting as a doctor and nurse with their father, who was pretending to be a patient needing care. What followed was a heartwrenching episode of Bluey pretending to be an insensitive doctor who does not care about the emotional needs of her patient and Bingo playing a nurse who was fighting for said patient's care.

It is an episode that works on many levels. For children, it’s a lesson in empathy that teaches them that they are not meant to be callous to other people’s wants and needs.

For adults, and really anyone who has had to navigate the painful realities of the modern medical system, it mirrors the cold indifference patients receive when interacting with many medical professionals. Throughout the episode, Bluey says the line “I’m very busy,” undoubtedly mimicking what he has heard a “real” doctor say.

Right then and there, age difference or not, I knew Bluey was a good show—one that appealed to adults while simultaneously not dismissing the children in its audience.

Parents love it

It’s not rare for adults to like shows meant for younger audiences—Adventure Time (2010–2018), Steven Universe (2013–2019), She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018–2020), Owl House (2020–2023), Centaur World (2021), and more all had sizeable adult audiences during their run times.

Yet, these shows usually target a tween or teenager demographic that can cover more adult themes and/or have unique worlds set apart from our reality.

Adventure Time was set in a fantastical world that satirized traditional fantasy and science fiction tropes—something such fans loved—and also dealt with heavy existential themes as the series progressed.

Steven Universe and Owl House not only include interpersonal conflicts that younger viewers can relate to but have characters fighting against authoritarian or fascist leaders (themes that might resonate with adult audiences).

Bluey is a show for preschoolers about preschoolers. Bluey and Bingo are not chosen heroes from a far-off land endowed with magical or supernatural gifts. The show is the opposite of a power fantasy. They are normal people — at least as normal as anthropomorphic dogs can be, anyway.

And so, why do adults love it so much?

There are many reasons. The most talked about is that it validates the experiences of parents. Caretakers Bandit (David McCormack) and Chilli (Melanie Zanetti) are people (or dogs) who are routinely overcome by the emotional realities of being parents to Bluey and Bingo, and that’s something that many parents can undoubtedly relate to. As Bluey creator Joe Brumm told The Wrap earlier this year:

“Kids love it because it’s silly and it reminds them of themselves — whereas I think it makes parents get emotional because having kids is emotional and it’s just a mirror to you. You’re not crying because of Bandit’s love for his kid, you’re crying because of how much you love your kid and he just reminds you of that.”

As that article documents, many parents were emotionally moved by the episode Sleepytime, where Bingo is trying to have a “big girl sleep” and not go into her parent’s bed. We, as viewers, watch her traverse through a dreamscape of the solar system, subconsciously processing her feelings of growing up, ending with the voice of her mother, Chilli, remarking that no matter how far they grow apart, she will always love her.

It’s a statement that brought many parents to tears.

Yet it also brought me to tears, and I am not a parent. What is the appeal for me and the many other childless adults I have talked to and read about who love this show?

Childless adults love it, too

I think it has to do with the fact that the show is teaching not only its children viewers to approach the world with compassion, creativity, and empathy but also its adult viewers.

Take the episode Daddy Dropoff, where Bandit rushes to get his children to school. His morning is overcome with setbacks, but he never stops playing with his children. Bandit and his wife Chilli value fostering a sense of creativity and imagination among their children above all else, and in this episode, the viewer realizes that play is not just for his kids but for him, too. When Bluey asks why her father played a game with Bingo, even though it made them all late, Bandit responds: “That it wouldn’t be as fun.”

It’s so rare to see a show acknowledge that adults are also people who need connection and play — a point made several times throughout the series (see also Stumpfest). Bandit and Chilli are not just adults moralizing to their children about blindly following their rules.

They treat their children as people who they want to understand them.

As such, that same empathy is lent to the adults in the series, too. The show recognizes that adults are not alien entities from their children but also people who need to practice empathy and compassion. From Nana Heeler (Chris Brumm) learning to be more confident (see episode Granny Mobile) to Chilli learning to relax (see episode Relax), there are entire episodes where the main lesson being learned is for the adults.

In the episode Squash, Bluey and Bingo pretend to control their father, Bandit, and his brother, Uncle Stripe Heeler (Dan Brumm), during a squash match. Bandit has an unhealthy relationship with his brother when it comes to play. Whenever he wins, he brags that “Big brothers always beat little brothers,” and that mentality starts to rub off on Bluey when she interacts with her younger sister, saying, “Big sisters always beat little sisters.”

Bandit realizes that he is wrong after his brother wins a match—thanks to motivation from Bingo—forcing him to admit that little brothers can beat bigger brothers.

If there is an unusual element of escapism to Bluey, it is that, unlike our world, the show is set on an Earth where all our characters are emotionally intelligent and solve their problems through kindness and communication. Bluey has earned a lot of adult fans from all sorts of communities, ranging from queer fans to neurodiverse ones, for how it makes these communities feel safe. As someone posted on the Autism subreddit: “I recommend all people on the spectrum [watch] Bluey.”

A Blue conclusion

On a meta-level, the show’s thesis is that we need to interact with one another empathetically. There is a scene in the episode Promises where Bluey wonders why she has to keep her promises, and her mother, Chilli, makes it clear that trust is what binds our society together. “The whole point of promises is to build trust. If there’s no trust, none of this,” she says, gesturing to all of society, “is possible…No libraries, no roads, no power lines.”

The idea that we all have to look after one another is a simple message, but one that is frankly not said enough in a world of Chosen One narratives and atomization. It resonates with many adults who look at the chaos of our society and wish our problem solvers looked a little more like Chilli and Bandit.

Our Search for Aliens Is All Vibes-Based

Image; Kevin Gill from Los Angeles, CA, United States

The modern hunt for extraterrestrials was partially inspired by aliens rumored to crash land in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, but the speculation of their existence dates back far earlier. The Greek philosopher Epicurus not only thought other worlds beyond ours existed but speculated that “other breeds of men” might dwell there.

While such speculations have made for excellent science fiction, we simply do not have much evidence either way. Some scientists claim it's only a matter of time, but others are less certain. The Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been going on for decades, and no “smoking gun” has appeared to confirm such beings' existence.

The most famous “tool” used by the SETI community to discuss the statistical likelihood of advanced extraterrestrial life is the Drake Equation, a mathematical formula said to map this out (more on this later).

And like many aspects of the SETI community, it does not appear to be very scientific at all, but entirely based on vibes.

The Drake Equation is nonsense

The Drake Equation is named after scientist Frank Drake, who, in 1961, wrote down an equation that could estimate the number of communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy.

This equation reads as follows:

N = R (the rate of star formation in the galaxy) * fp (the fraction of stars with planets or systems) * ne (the average number of habitable planets per star) * fl (the fraction of habitable planets where life arises)* fi (the fraction of habitable planets where intelligent life arises) * fc (the fraction of civilizations that exhibit a detectable technosignature) * L (the length of time these civilizations tend to emit such signatures)

The SETI community, which is made up of a number of organizations and institutions, has used the Drake Equation, particularly its assumption that there will be some form of “technosignature,” to run experiments to search for such life. These have ranged from experiments on wavelengths to radio to visible light to much more. The Drake Equation is seen by some portions of the scientific community as a legitimate framework (though not an actual equation) for such inquiries. As controversial science educator Neil deGrasse Tyson remarked in an interview over ten years ago on why some find it convincing:

“…even if you take pessimistic numbers [from the Drake equation], you get a huge number of planets with technology left over in the galaxy because you start with such a large number to begin with.”

And yet this certainty is a lie.

We are working off a data point of one and have no way to presently affirm the many potential manifestations life can and cannot appear. There might be a dizzying area of factors (not all of them necessarily required) that could prevent or hinder “intelligent” life from forming. In the words of physicist Tom Hartsfield in his essay Why the Drake Equation Is Useless, which calls into question each metric cited above:

“The worst thing about the Drake equation is that it gives us a false idea of grasping the problem we are trying to solve. A mathematical equation connotes some scientific study or understanding of a subject. But this is misleading: SETI is simply NOT a scientific endeavor. It’s entirely a leap of faith, albeit a leap that uses tools devised by science. It’s like searching for paranormal activity with an electronic sound recorder.”

There is not a single figure in the Drake Equation that we know with great certainty. The first two—the rate of star formation and the fraction of stars with planets—are vastly limited by our ability to observe the known universe. We can see more exoplanets and stars than we used to, making an educated estimate possible, but there are still profound limitations, as even a sun-sized star might be too difficult to detect from afar with current technology.

The other figures in this equation are not guessable. What counts as a technosignature? How do you define intelligence? What makes an environment habitable for not just the life on Earth but across the universe? These are questions we cannot even begin to answer because our knowledge is just too limited. This is something Neil deGrasse Tyson (who was accused of sexual harassment back in 2018) alludes to in that initial interview, saying:

“Those [figures] are completely unknown and you can just express your bias in what those fractions are.”

Our biases not only reflect how we can estimate these figures, but if we believe they are a useful framework in the first place. Frank Drake was using figures that, at the time, he considered useful topics of inquiry but have since been criticized, even by supporters, for needing an overhaul.

Take the example of star formation. It changes over time, and varies depending on the star type, making it not the best figure to even use for SETI. The ubiquity of planets likewise calls into question the need to factor in the number of stars that have a planet or system orbiting them.

It’s possible that as we learn more about the universe, we will not just refine these parameters but discard most of them entirely.

The Drake Equation is one of those premises that makes for great science fiction—and the ubiquity of intelligent life in the universe is one of my favorite tropes in film and television—but it’s only a story we tell ourselves, a vibe, using a scientific veneer.

An unscientific conclusion

Now, you may still believe aliens are out there, and I am not here to challenge that belief. I am merely here to underscore the reality that, given our present understanding of the cosmos, it is one not based on certainty but on faith.

A vibe.

Maybe the moment I publish this article, aliens will descend from the sky, affirming everything the SETI community suspects about extraterrestrial life. Feel free to make fun of me if that happens — I will also find it funny.

Yet maybe that will never happen.

As one character remarks in my favorite fiction podcast, Unwell, which is just as solid “evidence” as anything else:

“It doesn’t sound like math. It sounds like hope with the lightest dusting of math flavoring. The equation is not an equation at all…It’s not rational analysis, it’s a short story. A misleadingly named thought experiment.”

The Frustrating Science Surrounding Netflix’s ‘3 Body Problem’

Image; BLB, The Three Body Universe, T-Street, Plan B Entertainment, Primitive Streak, & Netflix

(Note: spoilers for the 3 Body Problem.)

Netflix’s 3 Body Problem (2024-present) is based on the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy (2008–2010) by Chinese writer Liu Cixin, about the Earth responding to an alien invasion en route at a distance approximately 400 years away. The show carries through many (though not all) of the book’s themes, depicting how societies respond to rapid technological and social transitions.

Much ink has been spilled about its critique of the Chinese Communist Party, with the inciting incident for the invasion being tied to a struggle student session where the character Ye Wenjie (played by Rosalind Chao and Zine Tseng) witnesses the death of her father for teaching the “imperialist” Albert Einstein. It’s this tragedy that prompts her to contact aliens, creating a moving commentary about how trauma can lead people to support misanthropic positions.

I want to focus on the text’s more “scientific” elements—i.e., the fictional theorems, equations, and paradoxes that make the logic of its world work. The 3 Body Problem is a fun thought experiment that uses the veneer of science to tell a particular story.

In fact, Liu Cixin’s “Dark Forest Hypothesis” — a subset of the “Fermi Paradox” (more on this later) — falls in line with a long list of fictional theorems and hypotheses that aren’t scientific at all.

Any sufficiently advanced technology…

The 3 Body Problem does base a lot of its story on actual science. The most obvious is its namesake, which describes a system with three different bodies that all exhibit gravitational force on one another. This makes such systems notoriously unstable, as is the case with our main antagonist’s home system, which is subjected to unpredictable gravitational forces.

However, the 3 Body Problem series also relies on fictitious equations, theorems, and hypotheses to build its world. The most obvious of them is Clarke’s Third Law (i.e., “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”) or its derivative, Shermer’s Last Law (i.e., “any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God”), as the alien San-Ti are treated as God-like entities by their human worshippers. As one human devotee named Mike Evans (Jonathan Pryce) says in season one:

“Unlike the mythical Gods our species has conjured up, our Lord [i.e. the San-Ti] truly watches over us.”

Shermer’s law is front and center here as these humans see this advanced technology and, in their ignorance, deify the San-Ti for being “better” than them.

For a series that prides itself on grounding its sci-fi technology on actual science, that is quite a departure from how humans have reacted to technological differences before this moment. In their criticism of Clarke’s Third Law in Gizmodo, Esther Inglis-Arkell uses the example of television. Most people do not understand the science that is fundamental to how a television works, and even if they do, few can build one, but that ignorance does not cause us to think of TVs as magic. In Inglis-Arkells words:

“…no matter what wonders scientists produce in a lab, from an electronic limb that amputees move using their thoughts to animal-less meat, we don’t point at them and shout, “Sorcerers!” We have no idea how it’s done but we sense that, given time and teaching, we could do it, too. Even the most extraordinary feats, which we are entirely ignorant about, we write off as science and technology.”

Furthermore, I would argue that there is a supremacist mentality underbidding our love for these laws in popular culture, as it assumes that people will encounter something they do not understand and react to it with fear, awe, and worship. As Inglis-Arkell goes on to argue:

“There have been plenty of crossovers between different cultures before now, and although people have been fooled briefly by technology, they generally [have caught] on pretty quickly.”

In truth, Clarke’s and Shermer’s laws rely on the old racist trope of militarily advanced people coming to a new land and being treated as Gods by those they violently conquered, as the Spanish are famously claimed to have been treated by the Aztecs.

Yet the idea that Cortés and other conquering Spaniards were worshiped as Gods was an ahistorical myth used to convert indigenous people to Christianity (as well as to retrospectively justify the invasion). The reality is more complicated. The Aztecs were an imperialist empire in their own right, and several polities sided with the Spanish expedition because they wanted a regime change, not out of a sense of worship.

In the show, many people supporting the alien San-Ti are nihilists who believe humanity is not worth saving. And so you can argue that some of them are more misanthropic than devout, but true believers are common among their ranks. “…you call them my superiors, but they’re your superiors too,” monologues one assassin with a zealotry that could rival any real religion. “… I’ve gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord.”

It’s this sense of devotion that I find strange. The West did not merely drop their ships on foreign shores and win through awe. There was no natural deification from the natives. It took in-person missionaries, violent conquest, and the destructive crackdown on native languages and practices to force cultures all over the world to adopt Western Imperialist values. Because of distance, the San-Ti are limited in the tactics they can use. Violence is possible but curtailed to covert actions.

Somehow, we have this entire religious movement prop up based on a largely ahistorical phenomenon. We have no evidence that people would worship technological superiors because they haven’t really in the past. It makes for good fiction (and that’s fine), but it’s not aligned with our current understanding of the social sciences and a storytelling beat that’s arguably rooted in racist tropes.

And that’s before even getting into one of the show’s other “scientific” foundations—the Fermi Paradox.

The Fermi Paradox and The Dark Forest

Another unscientific concept often framed scientifically, both in this narrative and outside of it, is the Fermi Paradox, or the idea that some factor or confluence of factors is limiting the development of advanced extraterrestrial life. This concept is accredited to scientist Enrico Fermi, despite little evidence that he proposed it. It appears to conflate a future author’s response to an inquiry Fermi famously made on a lunch break.

The Fermi Paradox has profoundly impacted science fiction (and real science research), and it’s arguably a core element of this entire show. Not only do we see a character reference it directly by reading Michael Bodin’s Fermi’s Paradox: Cosmology and Life, but the plot rests on this “paradox’s” existence.

In the 3 Body Problem, the Fermi Paradox is not only real but the result of interstellar aliens. The reason why the universe seems so devoid of life is that the moment a species reveals itself, another will come to conquer or destroy it to prevent being surpassed by it in the future. As written in the English translation of the 3 Body Problem’s sequel, The Dark Forest:

“The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life — another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod — there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them.”

This creates an incentive to destroy any life you come across in the universe, even innocent, fragile life, for the fear that given enough time, they might surpass you and come to pose a significant threat.

This is a fine premise for a book or show (media does not have to have realistic logic), but it’s not scientific. We have no idea how the mechanics of interstellar space travel would work in reality. Nor do we know how the many iterations of sentient life would behave or even really have a good conception of consciousness or intelligence. In the words of Robert H. Gray in a piece ultimately sympathetic to the search for extraterrestrial life:

“As for the paradox, there is none…There is no logical contradiction between the statement “E.T. might exist elsewhere” and the statement “E.T. is not here” because nobody knows that travel between the stars is possible in the first place.”

Furthermore, it should be noted that much of the discussion around this trope is arguably rooted in the same flawed cultural assumptions as Clarke’s Third Law and Shermer’s Law. The Dark Forest Hypothesis, at its core, assumes that alien life will embody the same imperialism of Earth to expand across the stars. Stories of non-human interstellar expansion use a data point of one—i.e., Earth, particularly the recent history of colonial expansion—and assume there will be a natural propensity for all intelligent life not only to expand but to react to difference with fear.

Yet the idea that even a single other species, let alone the vast majority of species, would react to different intelligent life so vastly far apart from them in space with genocide is something we have no way of validating.

It’s also one that is not backed up by current history and anthropology. Not even on Earth has every civilization reacted to cultural differences with an exterminationist response. Genocides and war do happen, but they are currently framed in negative terms, and we have plenty of examples of cross-cultural cooperation.

The Dark Forest Hypothesis is a fun fictional framing — but that’s all it is — and one that draws on our flawed cultural assumptions. It extrapolates the current philosophies of imperialism, colonialism, and supremacy — ones that are not even consistent across the planet, let alone all of human history — and generalizes them to explain life we have not even met yet (assuming it exists in the first place).

A spaced-out conclusion

Again, science fiction does not need to be realistic. Many times, writers use the flavor of science to tell a particular cultural narrative. Whether the story is about FTL, time travel, or space aliens, things like the Fermi paradox, wormholes, and nanobots are great ways to make those narrative points.

The 3 Body Problem is one of these stories, drawing heavily on pseudo-scientific social theories that reflect modern cultural assumptions more than innate aspects of the universe. It uses the veneer of science—as all good science fiction tends to do—to flesh out the perceived authenticity of a story.

Yet that does not mean these story tropes (and again, that is what the Fermi Paradox and Clarke’s Law are) are not the product of harmful biases. In the same way that the ancient aliens myth reflects a deep-seated racism that tries to downplay the accomplishments of Browner people (i.e., ancient aliens are always coming to Eygpt and Polynesia, rarely Rome), the Dark Forest Hypothesis takes the imperialism of the current era, and makes it “natural.”

If we do not make this fact explicit, the cultural assumptions embedded in works like the 3 Body Problem—i.e., that aliens might be as brutish, expansionist, and cruel as the current empires of the modern era — will be ones we do not think to question.

And if humanity is ever to reach for the stars, that would create one scary universe.

Men Have Become So Much Worse Now That I’ve Transitioned

Photo by Vinicius “amnx” Amano on Unsplash

One of the things that anti-trans people tell me over and over again is that I am not a woman. That because of my chromosomes or genitalia or some erroneous evolutionary biology, my feelings and experiences should be discredited.

And yet, I have lived as a femme person for years. I am gendered correctly by strangers. I get read as a woman at restaurants, and banks, and on dating apps. In truth, I have received few complaints about my womanhood from the people around me.

And most prevalently, I am treated by men like a femme. I am catcalled and harassed. I am degraded and humiliated, just like the countless other women around me.

It’s different now

Since I’ve transitioned, men have terrified me. This past year, a man has followed me on their motorbike, asking for my number. A man has trailed me outside a cafe door, asking what my plans are for the rest of the day. A man has struck a conversation with me in the middle of dinner at a restaurant, inappropriately touching my thigh.

Men weren’t great before my transition, either. I had experienced harassment in predominantly gay spaces (see The Case for Queer People to Talk About Sexual Violence), but not at this ubiquity. Men will message me on social media apps, and they will bring a level of obsession to their comments that was not as prevalent before my transition.

They will tell me they are driving 75 miles to see me. That I’m hotter than their wives. That I need to commit to a relationship with them before ever meeting.

Women used to tell me how bad men were to them, and I nodded, but I’m not sure I emotionally “got it.” I didn’t understand the entitlement.

Since transitioning, I have been shocked by the constant nagging and harassment men do when they don’t get their way. I wouldn’t respond in time to a comment and get called an “ugly bitch.” I would pick up my phone and find men angry that I didn’t reply to them, sometimes within seconds of their messaging.

I was not treated this way before.

Granted, I wasn’t treated well as an effeminate gay man, but there was a level of respect that has just vanished from many (though not all of) the men around me. I am treated like a nonperson more. Men don’t include me as much. They hear me less, and I find it can take several tries to impart what I am trying to say to some.

Unless, of course, I offer up my body, and then their fixations become so intense I worry sometimes what will happen if I say no. I have done it several times, and it’s completely different from when I was a man. I could tell men no during sex, and they mostly listened, but now it’s often a negotiation. I tell men no, and they try to argue. They make little promises they do not intend to keep and must be reminded of my humanity before agreeing to stop.

“You respect my choices, don’t you,” I’ve asked.

That usually works, though sometimes more begging is required. I need to make them realize they aren’t bad people, and that work makes me wonder if their goodness is just a story they tell themselves.

My sisters and friends tell me that eventually, I won’t have this problem as I will become invisible instead. I will go unheard and unseen in my old age as I find a secluded place on the margins. And that would be almost okay if I did not need the tools and resources men control to exist there, too. I fear I’ll still be begging for resources as a secluded spinster in the woods.

I never got why women put up with terrible men. “Leave his ass,” was the first thing I would say as a man. Because there are half-decent men out there, but as a woman, I know that half-decent men don’t run the world. There aren’t even that many of them.

I get it now. I cannot hide away because the margins are not a sanctuary but a tightrope — one too many women fall off of.

A gendered conclusion

It makes me so angry when anti-trans advocates call my feminity into question and tell me my gender isn’t valid because I experience sexism. I experience misogyny. If women have a shared trauma over men — so much so that many would rather come across a random bear in the woods than a random man — then it is a trauma I share.

I get the mistreatment of women so much more than I ever did as a man because I directly experience it. I have the before and after receipts to prove it.

I wish I didn’t have to to prove my femininity.

Conservatives Aren’t The Only Ones Who Are Classist

Image; Coastal Elite from Halifax, Canada; modified using Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

I remember heading to an orchestra musical performance for the Star Wars film A New Hope (1977). I am not the most cultured regarding “fine art,” but this event hit that perfect intersection of being both nerdy and music that I know. I was genuinely excited to watch a movie I love while listening to its score, enhanced by a real-life orchestra.

My family and I were riding on a free bus, which the theater center provides for those coming from downtown who do not want to worry about the venue’s limited parking. It was an unusual bus experience for someone who rides the bus frequently because everyone was decked out in their finest suits and dresses. There was this one woman, probably in her mid-50s, who was dressed in a sparkly white dress. She had an anti-Trump pin on and smiled at me. We struck up a very amiable conversation.

I must have been reading Rich because she cracked a joke that she felt was appropriate among people in her class. We were talking about how nice the bus was, and she said something like, “I never take the bus. You never know what kinds of people will be on it.” I frowned in that natural way one does when a joke doesn’t land, and our conversation died down from there.

Yet the comment stuck with me because here was a woman who considered herself a liberal, a progressive even, and she held an utter contempt for people who regularly take the bus — people she considers poor— and it’s a reaction I sadly see all too often among the Left.

Disdain for the rural poor

You could write a book on the classist character of the Republican Party. From the limiting of collective bargaining rights to a fierce attempt to block a raise in the federal minimum wage, it’s clear that many Republican powerbrokers hold utter contempt for the working class. We should call this nonsense out.

And yet, you can write an equally long book about upper-crust liberals being condescending to the “conservative” poor they think are beneath them. One common classist element I see on the Left is the utter contempt many liberals have for conservative-led states.

We see this a lot on social media whenever a disaster strikes a “red state,” and some liberal account will blame everyone who lives there. “I’m not a religious person,” goes one X user, “but from now on, any red state that gets hit by a natural disaster, I’m saying it’s God’s way of punishing them for their wicked ways.”

It’s clear that some of this resentment is coming from a classist association some liberals have with the “hicks” in red states, weaponizing the same rhetoric typically used by conservatives to deny poor people state benefits. “From farm subsidies to social security to Medicare to literally dozens of other examples, the typical red state citizen wouldn’t make it without handouts,” mocks one commenter. “Biden’s policies work for the poorest, least educated, unhealthiest states too. You’re welcome, Red States,” condescends another.

It’s a common sentiment spoken in liberal circles all over the country that liberals are better informed about the “facts.” Liberals think rural Americans, who they automatically associate with conservatism, don’t understand the suffering caused by the Republican Party. Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter With Kansas?— whose argument is that conservatives use cultural issues to redirect working-class resentments toward “liberal elites”— has been the defacto question on the liberal establishment’s mind for the last couple of decades.

Why aren’t conservatives adopting policies that, from the liberal perspective, are ultimately for their benefit?

This perspective verges on being infantilizing as it treats such voters as merely ignorant rather than worthy political opponents (or, in the case of liberals in such states, those suffering under regressive voting laws). Many “blue state” liberals develop a disdain for their supposedly ignorant peers. When people in these rural areas don’t do “what’s right for them,” then it creates the reaction we saw above, where such places (and people) are seen as deserving of that misfortune.

And a lot of people in rural areas certainly feel that condescension. In the words of one Redditor on this sense of resentment:

“I feel a lot of city liberals fetishize minorities and keep us around as friends almost like accessories to show how woke they are. I’m about as left as they get, but damn I’d much rather hang out with a group of Hicks. At least they’re genuine.”

Again, classism does not begin and end with the Republican Party. There are a lot of liberals who hold contempt for the “flyover states” they monolithically paint with a broad brush.

Knowing better

This classism can also manifest in one particular cultural indicator that liberals cling to without realizing that they are doing so. I am, of course, talking about education. I cannot tell you how many times liberals have told my debt-free self that I should go to graduate school or get a PhD because “I like learning.”

In truth, I want to do nothing less than go into debt my entire life for the prospect of a career I might not even land. Education is expensive in America—in part due to neoliberal actors stripping away funding—and it’s often quite classist in its own right. Higher education is jokingly (and sometimes seriously) referred to in feudal terms. As Tilman Reitz writes in the peer-reviewed High Education journal:

“…the US academic system is now a vital part of a capitalism with strong neo-feudal traits: a rent-seeking economy, a caste-like reproduction of social status, a para-statist power elite with alliances between the relative political, academic and corporate centres, and a post-democratic public sphere based on the representation of institutional prestige.”

In other words, education is integrated within our capitalist system and replicates many of its same problems.

Yet, in conversations I have in real life and online, education is repeatedly depicted as the solution for our political dysfunction, ignoring how capitalist actors have often co-opted it. According to some, we advance our goals not by securing a political majority and building alternative power structures but by ensuring everyone gets properly educated. In the words of Brian Karem in Salon:

“The United States is a nation of militantly ignorant people, arrogant in their beliefs, unable to change their minds and unwilling to try. We lack education.”

Karem is making the case that the American public’s support of Donald Trump and modern conservatism is rooted in our terrible education system.

This perspective is partly based on data showing that more education correlates with increasing liberalization, a correlation we still do not fully understand. It may be partly affected by polarization, increasing gender equity, and liberal family structures’ being more likely to send their children to university than the act of education itself.

Yet even if we fully understood this correlation (or lack thereof), it’s condescending to assume that your “side” is natural and right and that the moment someone receives “the facts,” they will agree with you.

That’s not how learning works.

There is no guarantee that someone will adopt “the correct information”—however nebulously that is defined—as a result of mere exposure to it. Congress is quite well-educated, and many of its educated elite are Republicans. Senator Ted Cruz went to Princeton University and Harvard Law School. Republican Senators Daniel S. Sullivan, Michael D. Crapo, and Tom Cotton also went to Harvard. This education did nothing to liberalize their perspectives. Far more complex factors affect someone’s political alignment than just education.

Furthermore, liberalism, while an umbrella term emphasizing individual rights and equality of opportunity within a capitalist system, has a variety of competing perspectives (see classical liberalism, neoliberalism, Social Liberalism, etc.). And that’s before even getting into the democratic socialist, communist, and anarchist philosophies that are on the Left but reject liberalism entirely. These philosophies are competing with one another, and education will not automatically lead a person to one over the other.

Yet, if you falsely believe that learning will lead someone to your side, that can create a toxic type of condescension. As Emmett Rensin critiques in Vox, this smugness has become a defining aspect of American liberalism:

“The smug recognize one another by their mutual knowing. Knowing, for example, that the Founding Fathers were all secular deists. Knowing that you’re actually, like, 30 times more likely to shoot yourself than an intruder. Knowing that those fools out in Kansas are voting against their own self-interest and that the trouble is Kansas doesn’t know any better. Knowing all the jokes that signal this knowledge.”

It’s this smugness that critics like myself claim is partially rooted in classism.

A conservative conclusion

The point of this piece is not to “dunk on liberals” for being better or worse than any other perspective. I want to reiterate that I don’t think the powerbrokers of the Republican party are any better (they are usually much worse). Many elite conservatives are classist in very tangible ways that deserve the utmost scrutiny.

Instead, it’s about how much of the Democratic Party’s current political strategy is rooted in paternalism. Voters are depicted as people who simply do not understand all the good politicians are doing—a demographic that needs to be marketed to rather than people with unique experiences and needs that our leaders can learn from.

And this problem doesn’t just apply to conservatives. If you think you are “right” and the other side lacks proper “education,” then you will most likely be just as paternalistic to factions inside your coalition as outside of it. We can see this in the current faultline between social democrat and progressive factions of the Democratic Party’s coalition with more neoliberal actors.

What’s the matter with Kansas can very quickly become what’s the matter with progressives and leftists? A question that winnows your coalition down until nothing is left.

Skylanders Academy: The Comedy Bible For Understanding Conservative Humor

Image; TeamTO (animation); Activision Blizzard Studios

There is this joke that conservatives aren’t funny. It’s an American meme perpetuated by everyone from YouTubers to emerging scientific research. Conservatives are often so focused on “owning the libs” that they don’t bother to see if their jokes actually land.

We could point to a lot of conservative media to highlight this trend of “punching down” for cheap laughs. The Daily Wire media organization has put a lot of energy in the last few years into creating comedies such as Lady Ballers (2023) and The New Norm (2024) that pretty exclusively have humor maligning identities they disagree with.

Yet today, I want to choose a more off-the-beaten-path example to highlight this tension: Skylanders Academy (2016–2018), a cartoon show about various mythical creatures saving a fictional world called the Skylands from the forces of evil. This derivative work has some of the most explicit conservative humor that I have seen in a modern kids’ show (that is not advertised as such), and I think that provides us a fascinating window into what conservative humor looks like.

Prison humor for kids

If you are a little skeptical that this children’s show has conservative messaging, take the season one episode titled, The Hole Truth, which is about the Skylander group volunteering as prison guards for a day. The entire episode hinges on the gimmick of the crew sending prisoners to “the hole,” aka solitary confinement, which in real life has been classified as torture.

“To the hole,” the Skylander guards say, almost gleefully.

For context, that would be like a kid’s show having a running bit in an episode where, as temporary torturers for the CIA, the main characters are waterboarding prisoners for fun. The whole point of the joke is for the characters to “punch down” at others they have a power differential with — in this case, guards vs prisoners.

The good guys are punishing the bad guys; cue laugh track.

This episode also has a spoof on the classic “don’t drop the soap” prison joke, which is traditionally all about how men are so unsafe from their fellow prisoners that the moment they bend over to pick up dropped soap in the shower, they will be sexually violated. It revolves around “weak” men getting their comeuppance when they show vulnerability (see also the “I wouldn’t do well in prison” joke).

“Don’t drop the soap” is the type of joke where the punchline is rarely said explicitly, mentioned more as a line of humorous caution. In the case of this episode, it is subverted to remove the allusion of rape entirely. “Because prison soap is expensive,” one of the inmates chimes in, with a plausible enough explanation for the kids watching at home while their parents can still “get” the more mature context.

These homophobic jokes are “funny” to many conservatives as a way to revel in the sense of perceived superiority, one of the earliest theorized sources of humor according to philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. Note: not every advocate of the superiority theory believes all humor comes from this element (see weak claims). I contend that an important element of conservative humor revolves around reinforcing hierarchy. The humor comes from mocking people and groups that are perceived to be at the bottom of the supremacist hierarchy, in this case, homosexuality.

As another example, a very common joke in conservative circles is the “I identify as an attack helicopter” spoof and its many variants. The whole point is to parody gender identity. If someone can identify as the gender they weren’t assigned at birth, why not an inanimate object or animal? To many conservatives, that position is just as inherently ridiculous.

And listen, the “identify with X” joke can be funny when done empathetically. Hannah Gadsby did a pretty funny “I identify as tired” bit in her standup special Nanette (2017), but often, American conservatives do not ensure that the material connects. The utterance of the insult is seen as enough to get a chuckle, and so when your audience doesn’t agree with that sentiment, it often creates a disconnect.

Hence, the meme that conservative humor isn’t funny. When you aren’t operating under that same framework of superiority, it just doesn’t land.

Fantasy cops

This sense of hierarchy is built into Skylanders Academy’s foundation. The show arguably falls within the genre of “copaganda” (i.e., shows that promote pro-police sentiments). The Skylanders operate as police officers for the fictional Skylands, and our protagonists often punish offenders for robbing banks, not paying a subscription fee, and other forms of property theft. They are shown to work not only with the prison system but also with this society’s court system.

Furthermore, unlike the complexities underbidding the causes of crime in the real world (i.e., poverty, housing, etc.), the Skylands are governed by a binary. Good guys have a certain amount of light inside them, and bad guys have darkness.

For example, in one episode called Who’s Your Daddy?, the character Jet-Vac (Greg Ellis) is alarmed to learn that his new child is acting quite mischievously. Jet-Vac worries that he is raising a bad kid. He then discovers that there was a mix up with his egg, and he had picked up the egg of a Greeble, a species predisposed to evil.

The dichotomy of good and bad is clear and simple.

A lot of the humor in this show revolves around those “evil” characters suffering. For example, Kaos (Richard Steven Horvitz) is the main antagonist in the series, and the running joke is that he is an incompetent “mama’s boy.” He lives at home in his mother’s former outhouse. In essence, he is what conservative influencers would classify as not a “real man” and, therefore, a ripe target for superiority-based humor.

There is even a point in the episode Space Invaders where he is compared to a “beta.” This comes from an outdated classification system derived from an old study of wolves in captivity by researcher David Mech, in which wolves were believed to have a hierarchy of alphas at the top and betas below them. This study does not resemble wolf packs in the wild, and Mech has done a lot of work to try to set the record straight, even taking out of print one of his old books from the 1970s.

But still, moral entrepreneurs continue to apply this erroneous framework to humans, claiming that human males could be alphas, betas, or lowly omegas. The alpha-beta rhetoric is so prevalent that we are seeing it in this children’s show. Kaos is very briefly able to become an “alpha” through your normal cartoon shenanigans, only for his fortunes to reverse by the end of the episode.

His “beta-ness” ultimately sabotages his goals.

Another dynamic is Kaos’s relationship with his “servant” Glumshanks (Norm MacDonald), a troll who is referred to as his slave on at least one occasion. Glumshanks has an adversarial relationship with Kaos, who tortures him regularly, both on and offscreen.

Once again, the humor comes from a lowly person being punished.

A conservative conclusion

Now some may dismiss my criticisms by saying that Skylanders Academy is just a kid’s show. A common stereotype is that these kinds of shows are not meant to be serious, and so they should not be criticized.

Yet artists who make children and young adult work do imbue serious themes within them (see Bridge to Terabithia, Matilda, and even Bluey), and their audience, while still learning, usually has a lot more comprehension than many adults tend to give them credit for. Kids are not “unintelligent,” and there are plenty of kids’ shows that respect their audience and advance complex themes.

When I watch Skylanders Academy, I see a lot of conservative humor based on supremacist thinking. The good guys exist in a world where morality is clear-cut, and the villainous characters always get their comeuppance. The humor comes in the reinforcement of this dichotomy.

This is a useful framework for understanding how conservative humor works, as it is based on a very rigid hierarchy. Conservatives are not funny to those on the left because many of us (though not all) possess a different intellectual framework that is usually more conscientious of power dynamics. We do not exist in the same political bubble where we find beating up on our subordinates to be funny.

As the left and the right become increasingly detached from one another, not even a laugh may be able to bring us together.

Many Americans Cannot Go On Vacation, So They Play Video Games Instead

Image; مهدی بلوریان https://www.farsnews.ir/photo/13980606001205/

One of my favorite YouTube channels is Minecraft & Chill, where a calm British announcer describes what idealistic "seeds" a player can generate for the optimal playing experience. "Imagine if your Minecraft world had the perfect location for a castle, a cozy cabin, or even a secret village," the announcer says, tranquil music playing in the background.

Minecraft is "procedurally generated," meaning the world is entirely different whenever you load a new game. However, you can input a string of numbers called a seed to get a world with specific attributes. Minecraft & Chill is a channel that takes the guesswork out of finding a world to play in. The joy of the channel comes from imagining what kinds of bases you can build in these idyllic settings: what worlds you can travel to.

"It looks like a travel guide for people who cannot travel," my partner remarked one day as I watched it.

It's a comment that has stuck with me because I use video games as an outlet for travel, and when I look at my fellow gamers, I see many doing the same thing.

Travel can be expensive

I remember really wanting to travel during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. I was stuck in quarantine, repeating the same routine over and over again, and I wanted to get out of there. The hobby I retreated into to “scratch that travel itch” was video games. I played titles such as Inkle's brilliant 80 Days (2014) and Bethesda's less put-together Elder Scrolls Online (2014), which allowed me to simulate the experience of going to new, often fantastical locales.

Many Americans had the same itch because the lessening of COVID restrictions caused rates of travel to more or less return to pre-pandemic levels, and it's overwhelmingly leisure travel. Shannon Osaka wrote in The Washington Post in 2023: "…traveling for vacation and other leisure activities has increased to offset the number of meetings now occurring via Zoom and other platforms."

Yet, inflation has led many Americans to change the kinds of vacations they take, even as Americans' plans to travel have increased. A survey commissioned by Forbes shows that taking fewer trips, going on road trips instead of flights, traveling during the offseason, and staying at less luxurious accommodations are all “on the table” for many Americans as ways to cut expenses this travel season.

These budget strategies make sense, given that travel costs have decidedly increased over the years. According to the Consumer Price Index, airline tickets alone shot up by 25% last year. From the many fees adopted by airline companies (such as baggage fees) to the increase in food costs, it's simply more expensive to travel now.

In essence, the rise in travel costs has made vacations less glamorous as an act of necessity (unless you are rich, that is).

Video game prices are increasing as well—the cost of everything is rising in this capitalist hellscape. Game developers, like airlines and vacation rentals, are squeezing as many price hikes, fees, and additional transactions as they can, but the price of a virtual experience will always be less expensive than in-person travel. As Gieson Cacho writes in The Mercury News:

“Sometimes a European vacation isn’t in the cards. Budget constraints prevents that plane trip and lodging or family commitments means that one can’t leave home. When that happens, video games offer an answer. Many of them can transport players to a desired destination though it may not be a one-to-one reproduction. Some of those destinations may not be even real at all.”

If one cannot afford the costs of a "traditional" vacation, it makes sense that many people are taking virtual retreats instead.

Virtual travel can be more fun

Video games serve as a type of escapism. You can engross yourself in them far longer than your typical movie or even television show. A modern TV show has eight to twelve episodes per season. The Witcher 3 (2015) has 100+ hours of content.

The player's frame of reference is also different. Unlike a movie or show, where you are passively watching something from the viewpoint of a third-party observer, with a video game, you take on the frame as the person doing the action. You often are the person traveling and going on exciting adventures. "In just a few clicks," Amar Hussain argues in Nerd Bear, "you can be flying over mountains, traversing jungles, driving through the British countryside, or diving under the sea."

This trend has only intensified as video game developers have focused more and more on "immersion" in recent years, where the players feel like they are, at least in part, experiencing the fictional world of the game. As a result, video games make players feel at the center of this experience because that's what games are typically designed to do.

This is very different from real-life travel, which has increasingly become less fun. The lessening of COVID restrictions—and the subsidization of "cheap" travel by corporations and governments—has led to an overcrowding of traditional vacation spots. For example, one travel company's founder last year recommended not going to the typical Mediterranean hotspots, arguing:

“Not only because these top locales are overpriced, but they are overrun with Americans this year, compromising on the international flavor and ambiance you would ordinarily get in the Mediterranean.”

If you want to see the sights in real life, you will find them increasingly crowded with other Americans obscuring the view.

Additionally, even before the pandemic, there was a gentrifying element to travel where not only could a narrow slice of the population afford these Instagram-worthy vacation hotspots, but it inevitably changed the local landscape of the places where such vacationers were going. As Rebecca Jennings writes in Vox:

“In attempts to woo wealthy cool-seekers, developers design restaurants, hotels, and public spaces to look like facsimiles of the restaurants, hotels, and public spaces determined by Silicon Valley investors to be what cool people should want. A coffee shop in Beijing now can look the exact same as one in Buenos Aires and as one in your hometown. Our tourist dollars, after displacing innumerable families from neighborhoods they’ve occupied for generations, then turn those same neighborhoods into playgrounds specifically for us.”

Real-life travel contributes to displacement because capitalist firms value the housing and desires of vacationers over locals. You come for the "authentic" culture and, in the process, remove the people who make that culture possible.

But in a game, you don't have to worry about ethics at all — at least not directly. It's a simulated environment that allows you to "skip the line" for the best views, shops, and locales while not displacing real people in the process.

When society is this toxic, games' disconnection from the real world can arguably be read as a plus—at least, that’s what I used to tell myself.

A roaming conclusion

Out of a population of over 300 million people, only about 40 million flew outside of the US in 2023, and that is by no means a yearly occurrence for every one of those passengers. That's roughly 8% of the population. Traveling to glamorous locations is (and has historically been) a rich man's (or woman's) game.

On the other hand, video games are an activity for the masses. Most Americans play video games on a regular basis. If one survey by TechJury is to be believed, 60% of Americans play video games every day. In an age where mobile games are cheaper than ever, it's far easier to play a video game than plan that Instagram-worthy trip to Porto, Tokyo, or what have you.

And don’t get me wrong, I love video games and consider myself an avid gamer, but I do see a strange dysfunction with our collective retreat into said games. It's not something we are necessarily doing so frequently because we all hate travel and other in-person activities, but rather because they are becoming so unsustainable, harmful, and expensive that we are retreating to the fun (and atomization) of video games by default. People got really into gaming during the pandemic because their activities were limited, and finances, although not as all-encompassing for everyone as a plague, have created those same kinds of limitations for many.

I am glad that the era of “cheap” airplane travel is dying because it was never sustainable — either economically or financially — to lift and propel that many people into the atmosphere every day. Travel, as it’s currently structured, is wasteful and exploitative, and that is not okay.

Yet I do want to continue traveling, even if it's at a different level of opulence than our society has grown accustomed to. There are rituals that come with traveling that I enjoy, such as the joy of a friend showing you their favorite places or sharing your culture with others. There are people who I feel closer with because I visited them, and engaged in that exchange.

I worry that we will increasingly miss out on those experiences, and our only consolation prize will be a screen—one that we don’t necessarily like that much but certainly was on sale.

The Horror of Watching Our Generation Lose Itself to Covid

Photo by Tyler Nix on Unsplash; edited to include people shadows

June 18th was my birthday, and I spent it inside, taking care of my partner, who had contracted both COVID and pinkeye — two things that can be related in a minority of cases.

I had not tested positive, but I wanted to avoid spreading the virus to others, so about a week beforehand, we started isolating together, as my partner needed my help with care. This is not the current recommendation from the Center for Disease Control (CDC), which I have learned has stopped asking people to quarantine within 24 hours of symptoms improving overall. If a fever is present, it has to be eliminated without using a fever-reducing medication. Note: the person is still encouraged to mask, wash hands frequently, engage in social distancing, get tested, etc., for five days afterward.

This does not seem adequate to me as people can still be infectious even if they show no symptoms at all, and it was a recommendation that was widely criticized by many members of the medical community. Dr. Lara Jirmanus from the health watchdog group The People’s CDC told CBS News before the guidelines were released: “Frankly, there has been no change in the science. Most people continue to be shedding the virus for about nine days, with a range of six to 11 days.”

This conflict between the infectious period, as defined by the science, and the CDC’s recommendation for isolation made it very confusing as a layperson to determine how long my partner and I should quarantine.

The surprises kept coming when my partner consulted a virtual doctor and was told in no uncertain terms that he could go about his day. He asked if there were any precautions he should take, and she said no (something, again, the CDC does not recommend, as there are still precautions people should take five days after symptoms have lessened). He was still showing symptoms and could still spread it, yet that was the advice he was getting from a so-called expert—advice that was not even in line with the CDC’s recommendations.

The messaging on COVID is abysmal — truthfully, it has been for a while now — and I worry about the long-term effects that will come from all of this advice.

Sickness everywhere

A lot of my friends have been getting sick recently. I see them hacking and coughing at parties and coffee shops. I watch them rub their snot all over their hands without sanitizing them with disinfectant or soap. It’s quite heartbreaking to watch.

I have also been sick a lot. I wrote an article in April about how I got the sickest I had been in a while after traveling, and based on the many sick people I saw around me, it did not seem like an unusual occurrence. As I wrote in that article:

“The man to my left was coughing. A lot of people on the plane were coughing. I had a mask on, but he didn’t. A lot of people didn’t have masks. There wasn’t hand sanitizer in many places in the airport anymore, and passengers were not given it.”

We have created a culture where sickness is common. An analysis from Bloomberg News has found that infections for many diseases, not just Covid, have increased dramatically since the pandemic. According to the report: “Over 40 countries or territories have reported at least one infectious disease resurgence that’s 10-fold or more over their pre-pandemic baseline.”

In the US, these appear to be predominantly influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Many factors have contributed to this increase, climate change being a big one.

Yet, while not stated in that analysis, it cannot be ignored that cases of COVID-19 have routinely been noted to have long-term impacts on our immune systems. COVID may not have caused the death rate of the Black Death. However, its effects are still quite debilitating, and millions of Americans have contracted long Covid, which has been associated with a dizzying array of health problems.

• One study found that long-covid generated a “higher burden of disability than either heart disease or cancer,” with over 80 complications ranging from blood clots to fatigue. Note: this study was conducted before the vaccine rollout and the development of antiviral treatments for COVID-19.

• You may have heard that COVID-19 can reduce a person’s IQ. Even mild cases of COVID-19 can cause longstanding brain damage, such as memory loss and inflammation akin to “seven years of brain aging.”

• It can disrupt the blood-brain barrier, contributing to potential brain fog.

• Covid has been noted to generate a substantial inflammation response that can contribute to autoimmune and inflammatory diseases.

• It’s also can potentially trigger deadly cardiovascular and metabolic illnesses.

Generally, Americans are not taking the necessary precautions to prevent the spread of this debilitating illness—and given the confused messaging I have remarked on, it’s not surprising. The CDC stopped requiring that “hospitals report COVID admissions and occupancy data” back in April of 2024, and it seems to me like an effort to reduce panic. As Marianne Cooper and Maxim Voronov noted of our government’s response in Scientific American:

“If the COVID situation is tracked and the public warned, things don’t feel normal. But if we don’t monitor or mention it, then things can feel ‘back to normal’ — fine, even.”

As a result, many Americans have stopped testing for COVID-19 and have likewise stopped getting their boosters altogether. A study released last year showed that most eligible Americans did not get a booster in 2022, and we have no indication that 2023 was much better in this regard.

Yet the annoying part is that the rich and powerful know that this disease is disabling. According to Dr. Phillip Alvelda, in an interview with the Institute for New Economic Thinking, some of our most prestigious institutions have adopted robust protective measures against COVID-19. As she remarks on the White House’s current COVID prevention procedures:

“…the White House has maintained the very strictest abatements to protect people who live and work there from the virus: In order to enter the White House, they have to have had no symptoms for 14 days, the latest booster vaccinations up-to-date, and a negative rapid test. They have nine or better fresh air exchanges per hour and all filters are upgraded to MERV 13. They have also installed 220 nanometer Germicidal UV lamps. After a positive test, you have to have a PCR Test negative to return to work.”

And yet, that investment is only being made for some. My friends are getting sick. I am getting sick. We are being told to go about our days as if things are normal — to return to work — and yet our leaders clearly see a reason to apply a different standard for themselves. As Dr. Phillip Alvelda continues in that interview:

“Most people have had COVID three and a half times on average already. After another four years of the same pattern, if we don’t change course, most people in the U.S. will have some flavor of Long COVID of one sort or another.”

A sickening conclusion

I worry about what will happen to this generation. We have already witnessed so much misery that it is sometimes hard to believe that this wave of negligence is not normal. We should not have to accept an entire population getting a debilitating illness.

That is not what “acceptable” governance looks like.

Many people are talking about collapse in broad, sweeping terms (see Forget Collapse: Things May Be Like This Until You Die). They point to the spectacle of destruction: bombs dropping in nuclear armageddon or great storms tearing up our ecosystem. These stories show everyone’s standard of living evaporating after one tragic day.

But to me, collapse does not have to be so grand. Collapse often reads as neglect. A government so intractable that it cannot even begin to solve fundamental problems. A government that would rather watch its public whither and die than do a damn thing about it.

This Trans Femme Has Never Felt Part of The Sisterhood

This image was originally posted to Flickr by elements_of_this_world at https://flickr.com/photos/135717563@N05/32056333643 and modified to include a trans flag gradient.

I remember one of the first times I went into a female bathroom. It was in a library, and an older woman came in with a walker. She looked me up and down and then loudly asked if this was the women’s bathroom. I don’t know if she was being cruel or simply oblivious, but it made me feel like shit.

Since then, I have never felt comfortable in women’s spaces. Even as my hair and boobs grew out and people started referring to me as ma’am and miss, there was always a hesitancy I had: Am I femme enough?

Do I deserve to be here?

I see so many people calling me and my fellow trans peers sisters, but sometimes it’s hard to believe that these words are anything more than talk.

Can trans people be part of the sisterhood?

One of the stereotypes I grew up on is the idea of the “sisterhood.” I would see this camaraderie among some, though certainly not all, women in movies (and in real life, as I grew up with sisters). Women would go into the bathroom together to gossip and provide aid when men were unnecessarily cruel. They would counsel each other through the misogyny of modern society. There was a sense of care I witnessed, always from afar. As proclaimed by the Emerge Woman Magazine:

“Sisterhood refers to the bond created between women who share a deep sense of empathy, understanding and support for one another. It goes beyond biological or familial ties and encompasses a long-lasting, unconditional friendship characterized by mutual respect, trust, and loyalty. Sisterhood promotes unity among women encouraging them to uplift each other towards greatness.”

A naive part of me expected to be included in this bond once my transition became more “passable” (i.e., when I was more readily read as a femme), but I have never felt it. There is a chill in the air I feel around women: a nervousness that one false move or word will lead to my discrediting, to being gendered a man or even an “It”.

And part of that anxiety is mine — something I must continue to work through.

However, it’s also how this alleged sisterhood sometimes operates that makes me uncomfortable, particularly from the actions I see from my fellow white women. When I go into the women’s bathroom now, as I have done for years, I see a lot of cruelty in those conversations by the mirror: a camaraderie often built around tearing each other down.

The other day, I was at the gym, terrified that I was showing too much stubble and that my T-shirt was unwomanly, only to hear two femmes gossiping about the women around them. They said something to the effect that wearing tight clothing was unsightly. That one woman was not wearing a bra for the benefit of the men around her. I wondered, briefly, if they were talking about me. I had forgotten to wear a bra that day. I had decided to go to the gym anyway, telling myself that no one would care — that I was engaging in a nasty case of the spotlight effect.

But clearly, people notice when such deviations happen.

People comment on my appearance all the time. They point to me during dinners and afternoon walks. They whisper about me from across the room, wondering which box I fall into, which myth I satisfy. They tell me which bathroom to use and sometimes even disagree with themselves over it. And many of my worst critics are women.

I am not the only one who feels the sting of such comments. Many trans people describe the sense of urgency they have when it comes to learning how to maintain their appearance. As the trans video essayist Natalie Wynn remarked in her video Opulence: “…that pain basically spurred me to work on my glow-up like it was the cure for cancer, like my life depended on it, which is how it felt.”

To become a white trans sister, I often feel like this is the only option: to forgo my complaints and wants and cling to the white supremacist standard of beauty. To work on that glow-up, the hair, the voice, the body — to be the same.

That doesn’t feel like sisterhood as much as it does a type of death.

This marginalization is common

It would be a mistake, however, to attribute this sense of marginalization to just white trans women — by no means is it only our problem. All women at the margins feel it.

The Black feminist scholar bell hooks wrote an entire book on how white women marginalized Black women in “feminist” spaces. Her book title was itself a reference to a famous speech by Sojourner Truth, talking in part about how Black women were being excluded from the conversation of womanhood and feminism (see Ain’t I a Woman?). As she said in that speech in 1851:

“That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man — when I could get it — and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”

It was a stunning condemnation of the racism in then-contemporary spaces that we remember to this day because it still resonates. Writing about the racist sexism she felt during second-wave feminism in her book, bell hooks noted that this sense of exclusion from white feminist women was often done under the banner of unity (i.e., what we could call sisterhood). White women feminists would attempt to talk about the problems of all women and inevitably exclude Black women in the process. As hooks writes:

“In most of their writing, the white American woman’s experience is made synonymous with the American woman’s experience. While it is in no way racist for any author to write a book exclusively about white women, it is fundamentally racist for books to be published that focus solely on the American white woman’s experience in which that experience is assumed to be the American woman’s experience.”

As we can see, women on the margins have been talking for a long time about the line where sisterhood begins and ends and how often some of the worst gatekeeping has come from their fellow “sisters” — a trend that is still very much alive in the present. In the words of Amber Wardell, Ph.D. in her 2024 essay Is “Sisterhood” What We Need?:

“…American women of all identities have been raised under white supremacy and patriarchy. Many of us have not done the necessary work to deconstruct these indoctrinated ideas. As a result, even exclusively female spaces cannot be entirely safe, especially for women with multiple interlocking marginalized identities. Indeed, women’s spaces are often replete with various -phobias and -isms that continue to make non-white, trans, queer, disabled, neurodiverse, or economically disadvantaged women feel unwelcome and misunderstood.”

It is hard to believe that such a sisterhood includes all women when often many “women” spaces exclude human differences in the name of “unity”.

An unsisterly conclusion

I don’t think the sisterhood has ever truly existed. The limiting nature of the sisterhood is not something uniquely part of my transgender experience but innate to patriarchy itself. The unity of sisterhood is not so much about liberation as it seems to be about conformity: about silencing those you disagree with and calling it peace.

Amber Wardell, Ph.D., mentions in her essay that true solidarity comes not in sisterhood but in coalitions, where different groups come together to achieve common goals.

“Coalition in the intersectional feminist movement focuses on the attainment of common objectives that center the needs of women with multiple marginalized identities, who are resisting oppression on multiple fronts. Understanding that women’s liberation is inextricably linked to racial, social, and class equality, coalitions forsake the futile pursuit of sisterhood and focus instead on dismantling all systems of oppression that affect women.”

These coalitions are fragile moments on the periphery where we are brave enough (and often maligned enough) to say yes, all women, all femmes belong here. We will not judge trans women, Black women, poor women, disabled women, fat women, immigrant women, and the many other multitudes of women that exist because we recognize that the only way forward is together.

It is the privileged — the rich, the white, the non-disabled, the cisgendered, the straight, etc.— who need to hold their judgment and ask if they would rather have their sisterhood or their coalition.

For they cannot have both.

The Star Trek Episode that Predicted the Future of Homelessness in the United States

Image; Edited Photo by Ivana Cajina on Unsplash with text and DS9 station image added.

City blocks that are filled with unhoused people. Laws against sleeping on the street. Intense militarization that keeps impoverished people in line so that they don't rebel.

Given the rise in unhoused people we have seen across the United States, this might sound like modern-day America, but I am describing the time-traveling two-parter Past Tense from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, in which Commander Benjamin 'Ben' Sisko (Avery Brooks) and his compatriots Doctor Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig) and Lt. Cmdr. Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell) find themselves in the "past"—what is to them 2024 America—only to be trapped in a concentration camp for the homeless.

At the time, it was written as a cautionary tale of what could happen if America let militarization and wealth inequality exacerbate, but as we have ignored these lessons, the 2024 of Star Trek and the 2024 of today are starting to look frighteningly similar.

This is America

When Past Tense was being made, this future was already much closer than some suspected. As the episodes were being filmed, showrunner Ira Steven Behr remarked on reading a story from the Los Angeles Times about how the city's then-Riordan Administration was planning to move the unhoused people of the day from the downtown to "an urban campground on a fenced lot in the city's core industrial area."

In many ways, this is unsurprising as the creators were not imagining the future as much as heightening the present reality. Writers Robert Hewitt Wolfe and Ira Steven Behr were allegedly inspired to co-write this episode based on their interactions with unhoused people. Wolfe telling Vox:

“My wife worked with homeless and mentally ill people as a psychotherapist. Ira [Steven Behr] said what convinced him to do the episodes was walking through Palisades Park in Santa Monica and seeing all the homeless people there. They’re still there. It hasn’t changed. We weren’t being predictive. We were just being observant.”

In Past Tense, it's this struggle with America's long criminalization of homelessness that takes center stage. Our leads — Benjamin Sisko and Julian Bashir — are immediately swept away to a "Sanctuary District" for allegedly sleeping on the street, which is illegal in this version of America. "There's a law against sleeping in the street," a cop (Dick Miller) instructs coldly before carting them off to a concentration camp.

Right away, there is an important similarity to current America that we need to point out. The legality of sleeping on the street may depend on where you live, but such a right is getting more tenuous every day. While the 2018 Ninth Circuit case Martin v. Boise ruled that a city cannot have an anti-camping ordinance without proper shelter for unhoused people—which is why many states and municipalities within that jurisdiction (e.g., California, Washington, Nevada, Oregon, etc.) have had much more visible homelessness in recent years— even these localities have tightened their restrictions.

For example, the city of Portland recently narrowed restrictions on street camping to make it, if not outright illegal, much, much more difficult. According to KPTV Portland, "…camping that blocks businesses, private property, or a public sidewalk will be banned." While violators will first be offered "diversion programs," mainly in an effort to avoid an ACLU-driven challenge under the pretext of Martin v. Boise, failure to comply will risk fines or jail time.

Theoretically, if the city does not have enough beds for the unhoused population, they can keep their camping area as long as it remains "tidy," but given the subjectivity of such a thing, an appeal to "sanitation" will undoubtedly be used to clear such camps in the future.

Other states outside the ninth circuit are under even fewer restrictions. Texas has banned camping on public lands. It's a felony to do so in Tennessee. Municipalities and states nationwide have passed or attempted to pass laws that limit camping and have also frequently cleared encampments.

However, the limited protections in Martin v. Boise seem to be at risk. The yet-to-be-determined Supreme Court case of City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson, would decide if governments could "arrest or fine people for sleeping outside when adequate shelter is not available." A ruling in the affirmative would mean that local localities can pass such restrictions with impunity—a likely scenario given the conservative nature of the current Supreme Court (something that may have already passed, depending on when you are reading this).

We are quickly heading to a reality in which what that guard said in the episode Present Tense is considered true: sleeping on the street will be illegal.

The racism and ableism of the housing system

Another similarity that should also be noted is the racism that Past Tense highlights within the homelessness system. It's not surprising that police officers sweep up the Black Ben Sisko and the Brown Julian Bashir, but the white-presenting Lt. Cmdr. Jadzia Dax avoids such scrutiny. This oversight metaphorically represents the racialized caste system so common in America. As Zack Handlen remarks in AV Club:

“…the ease with which Dax is able to get what she wants and move through the upper echelons of society, while Sisko and Bashir struggle to get breakfast, is telling.”

Although the data on the number of unhoused people in the United States is far less robust than many advocates would like, the information we do have reveals a racialized element. A Cornell-led study tracked the rate of homelessness from 2007 to 2017 and found that Black and Indigenous people were far more likely to experience homelessness. According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness:

“African Americans make up 13 percent of the general population but more than 40 percent of the homeless population. Similarly, American Indians/Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, and people who identify as two or more races make up a disproportionate share of the homeless population.”

Likewise, there is also the fact that homelessness is impacted heavily by people's mental health. "Some of these people are mentally ill," Bashir remarks of the sanctuary residents, "They need major medical treatment."

Yet, as Commander Sisko notes, they often do not get it. Mental health has long been reported to impact housing (and vice versa). According to Deborah K. Padgett in the peer-reviewed BJPsych Bulletin, there is a dearth of psychiatrists who accept Medicaid (the most common type of insurance homeless people who have insurance are on), making "coverage virtually unattainable in many parts of the US."

Like the illegality of camping on the street, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine merely described the reality of the unhoused epidemic in America — one that has gotten worse over time.

The emergence of sanctuary districts

A significant difference in the episode is that although Captain Cisko talks about Sanctuary Districts being set up in every major city across America—i.e., designated zones where the government allows “non-criminal” unhoused people to live in squalid conditions —we are not presently there. We may give unhoused people few places to live, force them to clear out, and destroy their stuff when it becomes too "unsightly," but they are not yet confined to specific locations.

Although, don't be too optimistic; the tide has started to turn in that direction. Many cities are operating legal homeless camps, even as they ban outdoor camping in other areas, effectively making de facto sanctuary districts.

In Montana, where the state legislature is fiercely debating limiting homeless encampments, the county of Missoula has created a "Temporary Safe Outdoor Space," which aims to redirect residents to more permanent housing. The project’s aim is noble, but given the dual goal of making homelessness out of sight across the state, it’s easy to see a project like this get overburdened.

In Portland, Oregon, the city has pledged to build city-run homeless encampments while, as we have already established, limiting where "illegal" encampments can exist — something that threatens to overwhelm existing infrastructure.

In Austin, Texas, the state Department of Transportation has gifted a space off US Highway 183 to an emerging self-governing district called the Esperanza Community, which is already at capacity. It's, again, a wonderful idea that I am worried could be warped into something terrible, given that Texas has banned camping on public land.

In fact, an entire cottage industry has started to arise as businesses such as Sprung Structures market themselves to cities and states across the country to build such housing. A financially “viable alternative” considering that market limitations (i.e., landlords being unwilling to house people with challenging conditions at a reduced rate) make it difficult to find affordable housing in the "traditional" marketplace.

Commander Sisko may have been off about the exact date of Sanctuary District's ubiquity, but it's a future that very much seems on the horizon.

A grounded conclusion

The episode ends on a hopeful note—well, as hopeful as a dystopia can be, anyway.

In early September of this year, the Sanctuary residents riot over their mistreatment. They capture some guards, and the US government, like it so often does, overreacts, killing hundreds of unhoused people.

In the Star Trek universe, this inciting event allegedly led to a tide change in how America handles homelessness. "The riots will be one of the watershed events of the 21st century," Sisko monologues. "…Outrage over [the death of residents] will change public opinion about the sanctuaries. They'll be torn down. And the United States will finally start correcting the social problems it had struggled with for over 100 years."

It's difficult to tell if this prediction will come to pass. Science fiction is only a mirror of the present, not a crystal ball of the actual future. Sisko was talking about how the writers of the time believed we should solve this problem — a worthy lesson to consider.

"Eventually, people in this century will remember to care," Sisko says. I hope we have the courage to listen.

The Surprising Reason Pop Culture Monsters Are So Adorable

Image; Dad-wikimasters

The protagonist turns a corner, and there is a creature. Its jaws are extended, and rows upon rows of teeth are revealed that can bite down on our lead in an instant. An alien growl sends a shiver up our spines. We are confident their death is imminent, and then something happens: the monster closes their mouths, their face softens, and they look just so utterly adorable.

Pop culture is filled with so many cute and fuzzy monsters that we cannot help but love. Pikachu from Pokémon. Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon. All over the world, people's homes are filled with plushies, action figures, and body pillows of these adorable monsters.

Yet, it's not all positive. Our love for these creatures reflects a deep-seated bias within humanity that has far more wide-reaching consequences than what we decide to watch on the silver screen.

When they resemble pets

Pokémon (1997-present) is probably the most widely known show about monsters, yet its creatures are so cute that many forget that its name is a portmanteau of the words “pocket” and “monsters.” Our protagonist, Ash Ketchum (Rica Matsumoto/Veronica Taylor/Sarah Natochenny), is escorted by creatures who can erupt into flames, chuck objects into the stratosphere, and more, and those terrifying feats hardly register, given how adorable Pokémon are.

We mostly don't think of “Pocket Monsters” as monsters, and that's because they emulate our relationship with pets. Ash Ketchum hugs, feeds, and takes care of his terrifying little creature in the same way you would a cat or a dog. This brand mimics the relationship of animals humans already care for deeply (at least most of us), and so it makes sense that Pokémon would trigger an empathetic response.

Image; OLM Team Kato

Pokémon is far from the only property that does this. Most games and shows where you "collect" monsters replicate this dynamic (see Digimon, Ni No Kuni, etc.). Cute monsters are trainable and obedient, and terrifying monsters are not domesticated but wild.

We see this dichotomy represented in the anime My Daemon (2023), a world similar to Pokémon, albeit much darker, where monsters or "daemons" have overrun the world, and a narrow group of people can train them. Our lead, Kento (Miyuri Shimabukuro/Cassandra Lee Morris), owns a daemon called Anna (Kokoro Kikuchi/Cristina Vee) that, although covered with terrifying eyes and pink flesh, treats Kento with love and respect, never appearing to put him in danger.

Anna is cute.

Image; Igloo Studio

That is, except when she loses herself in rage over her desire to protect Kento. In these moments, she transforms into a terrifying, slender monstrosity with slanted eyes and wolf-like features.

Image; Igloo Studio

The scariest part is that she has no control over these moments. She becomes feral. I argue that this feralness causes Anna to shed her cuteness. She has moved from being a pet to a danger — to just a monster.

When we recognize their pain

Another way to hijack our empathy for monsters is to learn they need help. A common trope in media is for a creature to terrorize a locality, only for our hero to learn that the monster is lashing out because it is hurt. The source of their pain is usually a thorn, arrow, spear, or other prick-like object embedded into the monster's hide or flesh — something the creature cannot remove themselves.

An ancient version of this trope can be found in the Aesop tale of Androcles and the Lion, where an enslaved person has run away from his cruel master. He is hungry and alone in a forest when he hears a roar from a monster and tries to flee, but unfortunately, his foot gets stuck in a root. Androcles anticipates his death, but when a wild lion approaches, it begs him to remove a thorn from his paw.

Androcles empathizes with the lion’s pain because he is used to being harmed by his former enslaver. He removes the thorn, and the two become friends.

Yet, this pain we empathize with is not always physical. To return to My Daemon, in the episode A Tough Decision, there is a terrifying creature called Baron (Nobuyuki Kobushi) that resembles the parasitic creatures from the Metroid games. In most narratives, this is the type of creature you gun down for points.

Image; Igloo Studio

Yet, as viewers, we develop immense empathy for Baron because he's under the ownership of an abusive handler. We empathize with his pain as his owner shocks him into submission. He whimpers in a way we can understand, pity, and maybe even relate to.

The emotional pain of monsters we click with is not always theirs. Another common trope is to learn that a monster is only terrorizing an area to protect its offspring, whatever those may be. A modern example is the owlbear from the video game Baldur's Gate 3 (2023), who you discover after entering a cave and find that she is merely protecting and providing for her cub. While you can kill her (BG3 is an open-ended game that allows you to do many terrible things), it's not framed positively. If you don't kill her, other enemies will instead, and your character will remark on how the mother owlbear deserved better.

If we recognize a maternal instinct in a monster, our empathy for the creature seems to widen, especially for the babies it protects.

Image; Larian Studios

Yet again, feralness (i.e., the potential to harm people) often comes into play here. The Queen in the Alien movies is also protecting her children by sending out face-huggers to devour human hosts from the inside out, but that type of procreation is so foreign to how we perceive ourselves it's rare for it to earn our empathy.

It's also important to note that we must recognize the pain inflicted upon the creature or its offspring, which biases the verbal communication and body language we are used to. If the creature's expressions are unreadable, then we, as viewers, never get comfortable enough to empathize.

A great example of this is the alien invasion movie No One Will Save You (2023), in which protagonist Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever) and, consequently, the viewer have trouble deciphering the invaders’ intentions. There is an excellent scene in a hallway where the alien makes an obscure symbol, and I cannot tell what it means to this day. The whole point is that no one really can.

Image; 20th Century Studios; Star Thrower Entertainment

It is too unknown to be cute.

When they look like us (evolutionary speaking)

As we have alluded to, similarities with how humans act and, more importantly, look are a quick way for people to develop empathy with monsters. Most Pokémon, particularly the more popular ones, have wide eyes and mouths that more closely resemble humans. Whether you are looking at Pikachu or Dragonite, they have the ability to smile, laugh, and emote by saying their own name.

Image; OLM Team Kato

When creatures are depicted as having such expressions and vocalizations, it is much easier for us to develop empathy for them. It's not a coincidence that many fictional creatures that we consider "alien" and "evil," from the tentacled Mindflayers of Dungeons & Dragons to the frightening inter-dimensional aliens of The Mist (2007), resemble non-mammalian animals such as insects and octopuses.

Online, whenever these monsters are "cutified" by various artists, they usually superimpose large eyes and other facial features to make them more human-like. The Deviantart artist pokketmowse, for example, turns a menacing Dungeon & Dragons’ Beholder into something adorable by softening the skin, narrowing its frame, causing it to blush, adding eyelashes, and adding a smile—all mammalian features.

This idea of cuteness being related to mammalian traits doesn't just apply to fictional animals either. In environmental conservation, there is a concept known as "charismatic megafauna," a term given to creatures that humans identify with, such as lions, elephants, and gorillas. These animals often become the ones used at the center of conservation campaigns or, in the case of the giant panda with the World Wildlife Fund, the face of organizations.

Unsurprisingly, these creatures' "charisma" often relates to their human-like features. As written by Sutirtho Roy in Wildlife SOS:

“Anthropomorphism is defined as the tendency to attach human attributes to non-human (animal, plant or inanimate) matter. Often, the process is intuitive, leading us to attribute certain animal characteristics being similar to humans.

Size of the animal and its physical features are factors that prompt sensitive reactions from human beings. Charismatic animals therefore fit well into descriptive categories like “cute” or “cuddly” because of large and forward-facing eyes, delicate and infantile features and fuzzy, round faces among others.”

This overidentification with such animals is not always good, as it leads to our neglect of creatures such as snakes and insects that do not have these features but may still be vital to a particular ecosystem.

This is why some environmental groups have attempted to switch over to the language of “habitat protection” rather than focusing on individual animals, as our tendency to bias "cuteness" can sometimes get in the way.

This a more pressing problem that pertains to more than just fictional monsters.

A monstrous conclusion

For as long as humans have had stories, there have been demons, terrors, and other monsters. Creatures that stab, maim, and kill humans from the darkness and illicit a sense of panic that causes us to want to retreat into ourselves.

And for just as long, some of these monsters are creatures we can empathize with — animals that resemble our pets, parents, and caregivers. Creatures who wear smiles and make sounds we can relate to on a human level.

However, this sense of empathy is not universal. We tend to bias creatures that act like us, feel and express emotions in the same ways as us, and are often mammalian, just like us.

Fiction is a tool that, at its best, can expand our empathy for different people, scenarios, animals, and even things. I hope to see our anthropomorphism combated more in future stories. With the environment at risk from our own activity, there is far more at stake than simply what creatures we shriek at on the silver screen.

Doctor Who Gave Us A Trans Villain We Can Stand Behind

Image; BBC

When we first meet Maestro (Jinkx Monsoon) in The Devil's Chord, they burst energetically out of the hood of a piano fully at an 11 out of 10. Everything about them is over-the-top. They are an otherworldly being personifying music itself, and they love the tones created by nuclear armageddon most of all.

It's obvious that the Maestro must be stopped — they are the villain, after all. Our heroes, the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and his companion Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), spend the rest of the episode trying to defeat a villain propelled not by shame or stigmatization but by an unabashed confidence in their desires and wants—a characterization that is rare in trans media, even today.

The trope of trans villainy

Hollywood has a long history of demonizing queer people, particularly gender "deviant" people. Sitcoms ranging from The Jeffersons (1975-1985) to The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour (1957-1960) have long played gender nonconformity for laughs, and you don't have to look too much to find downright villainous portrayals.

For example, the infamous Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho (1960) centers on such "deviancy" as a plot twist. The entire film focuses on the murders happening at the infamous Bates Motel. The viewer is led to believe that the mother of the motel proprietor is somehow responsible, but you ultimately learn that she is dead.

Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) has been cross-dressing as her as the result of an alleged mental breakdown. His gender nonconformity is quite deadly.

This legacy relates to The Motion Picture Production or "Hay's" Code (1934-1968) and The Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters (1952-1983), which validated society's anti-queer norms by demonizing LGBTQ+ representation in media. While transness was not referenced directly, the Hay's Code insisted on films portraying the "correct standards of life." The Television Code was more explicit, saying that "criminality," which gender nonconformity was at the time, "shall be presented as undesirable and unsympathetic."

And even when these codes were repealed, this negative stereotype lingered.

For the longest time, the go-to association for a trans person was the serial killer Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) from The Silence of the Lambs (1991), who was skinning women alive to create a body suit in order to, as actress Jen Richards remarks in the documentary Disclosure (2020), "appropriate the female form." Before that, there was the murderous Angela Baker (Felissa Rose) in Sleepaway Camp (1983) or the vindictive Dr. Robert Elliott (Michael Caine) in Dressed to Kill (1980).

Trans characters should be allowed to be villains — trying to make trans characters positive all the time is equally problematic — but their gender dysphoria shouldn't cause their villainy. That paints the unhelpful association that being trans causes people to be "bad."

There are still transphobic films that get made that fall within the trope of trans villainy, but they are not as common in the present moment, and new tropes are thankfully being built in their stead.

The breaking of the trope

As we have started to move past this antiquated vision of trans villainy, the way trans villains have been depicted has started to become more multifaceted.

A great early example of this is The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), with the vicious alien scientist Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry). While the film was undoubtedly constrained by the norms of the time, there is more empathy for Frank-N-Furter than we see in prior and even many future portrayals of gender nonconformity. When they die at the hands of their former allies Riff Raff (Richard O'Brien) and Magenta (Patricia Quinn), it is played as something the audience should feel sad about — not something to laugh at or applaud.

Mr. Robot (2015–2019) is another more modern example of this three-dimensionality. As the leader of the Dark Army terrorist group, the trans character Whiterose (BD Wong) is brutal in enacting her vision for world domination. She serves as one of the show's primary antagonists, but her actions are driven out of a more philosophical aim to make the world better than out of some innate depravity.

Yet both these examples, although multifaceted, are rooted in the shame that comes with society's rejection of queer people. Frank-N-Furter does not feel like they belong anywhere in the universe, melancholically singing how they feel unease wherever they go (see the song I'm Going Home).

Likewise, Whiterose is driven by a desire to assert herself in a world that hates her. She has been closeted her entire life because she does not think it's possible to assert her identity and hold onto power at the same time. Whiterose has used her vast fortune to invest in a magical type of fringe science that will allegedly remake reality into something not so terrible.

Maestro is different from these portrayals in the sense that they are not of this world. Born outside the universe, they are a queer writer's imagination of what queer evil would be like untethered from the taboos of modern society. When Maestro is first introduced in 1925, a man misgenders them, and they confidently correct him, unbothered by the potential backlash that could ensue.

"I'm them," they explain, bored by the man's very presence.

There is no shame surrounding Maestro's portrayal. Although they may be homicidal and dastardly, they know who they are and do not care about our society's conventions.

In fact, they break them. Maestro steals music from all of humanity for their own selfish desires, and I couldn't be happier to see it (on-screen).

A disconcordant conclusion

Of course, it's impossible to write a character who is truly detached from the norms of our society, as the writer who births them is inevitably very much attached to such things. We are always implicitly discussing the present, even when focused on the fictional past.

Yet it's interesting to see the outline of what transness can look like detached from shame. We talk about pride so much within the queer community. It was a necessary defense mechanism in response to a society that shamed queer people into oblivion.

In Maestro, I see the next step: the glimpses of a world without shame — nuclear apocalypses and all.

The Case for Queer People to Talk About Sexual Violence

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

I remember my first sexual encounter was with a man (let’s call him A) in high school. We played hooky during gym class and made our way to the men's bathroom (this was before I transitioned). I didn't know what I was doing and was very uncomfortable doing it, but A insisted. He brought me to the bathroom stall and f@cked me raw. Talk of condoms was never mentioned. Nor testing or consent. He pushed into me for several minutes before we were interrupted by a student walking in.

I don't remember how the sex went. I do remember walking home later that day, telling myself over and over again that it wasn't rape. I had wanted to be there at first, I reasoned. I had not stopped it. Worse, I had sat there lifelessly to the point where he remarked how still I was.

How could I have been raped when I did nothing?

I remember crying in the bathroom shower at home as I washed away the blood from my body. I told no one what happened. It took me years to be honest with the assault, and even as I went to therapy and started taking medication, I was deeply uncomfortable with sex, always believing I was one hookup away from someone hurting me.

Recently, I have started talking about my assault, and it's been liberating. I can have sex again, and it's opened up space within me that I didn't think was possible. In fact, I wrote an entire book where one of the main characters experiences sexual assault, and I am not afraid to admit that it draws heavily from personal experience. (See The Bubble We're In.)

The shame and guilt I have felt has dissipated, and I want to make the case for such vulnerability in the queer community, where we normalize talking and listening about our experiences with sexual violence as a means of strength.

The stigma surrounding sexual harassment and assault

In general, it's tough for people to talk about sexual assault and harassment for a variety of reasons. Researchers in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS One have found that sexual-violence stories, either negative or positive, are generally perceived as more challenging to share than other tragedies and less likely to be shared.

One of the reasons for this is internal or a person's self-image. Academics in the peer-reviewed Violence Against Women Journal found that self-stigma from sexual violence victims can correlate with "increased levels of trauma symptom severity."

There is also the social stigma that comes from being believed (or not) by your support network, which has been noted to have a huge impact on your self-image. As summarized in that Violence Against Women Journal article: "Considering self-blame, if a survivor's social network responds by blaming her for the assault, self-blame is greater than if she is not blamed by her support network."

Finally, there are cultural stereotypes that make being believed more difficult. For example, there is an infamous stereotype that someone sexually harassed or assaulted is to be blamed for their assault if they wear "revealing" clothing, have a "promiscuous" pattern of behavior, and other such actions.

All of these lenses intersect, as cultural and subcultural norms can influence in-group norms (and vice versa), which impacts one's self-image.

With LGBTQ+ people, there is the added wrinkle of anti-queer opponents often linking us to sexual abuse. There is a malicious conspiracy theory, popularly proposed by conservatives going back decades, that being sexually assaulted is what made us queer in the first place. Anti-gay advocate Joseph Nicolosi is noted for saying in 2009: "If you traumatize a child in a particular way, you will create a homosexual condition." Some may not wish to be open about their experiences for fear of validating such odious myths or being discredited because of them.

There is also the moral panic of us being called groomers, where many modern-day conservatives believe queerness to be inherently linked to pedophilia (see I'm Trans & Society Removed My Comfort Around Children). We do "not reproduce, but must recruit," goes the infamous bigoted saying, and in an effort to downplay the Groomer Conspiracy Myth, some may downplay their experiences of sexual violence altogether.

And so many queer people often have a hard time talking about sexual assault and harassment, with underreporting being quite common, particularly with queer students. The systemic biases queer people face intersect with the already stigmatized nature of sexual assault to make it less likely that queer people will report anything.

Helping to preserve communities of healing

Yet, as queer people, we don't have the luxury of hiding or being withdrawn, no matter how much society conditions us to do so. We are more vulnerable to sexual assault and harassment than our straight and cisgendered peers by a significant margin, especially when we focus on bisexual people and other less accepted sexual orientations and gender identities: something that compounds with race, sex, and class. According to the Bureau of Justice, for example:

“The violent victimization rate for bisexual females (151.2 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 16 or older) was eight times the rate for straight females.”

This problem is serious and well-documented. We need to help each other here, and talking about our bad sexual experiences (and, more importantly, listening to the experiences of others) is part of how we bridge that gap. The American Psychological Association has a formal guide for psychologists on how to deal with patients who have experienced sexual assault, and one of the most important things is providing a space free from judgment, writing:

“So far, the data suggest that survivors often receive mixed reactions in their informal support networks…Family and significant others were particularly likely to issue ultimatums to the survivor about getting formal help and to get frustrated if the survivor did not...

…survivors delay telling others because they fear being blamed for the assault and because they don’t want to burden others. Some worry that if they tell family members, they might react violently against the offender.”

Fostering an environment where we accept people's stories is a type of care that not many automatically receive. It's a lesson for all of us to pause when our family members, friends, peers, and loved ones tell us heavy news and to listen before we respond.

Yet it cannot just be about talking and listening: awareness and empathy are only a tiny part of the battle.

We also need to materially support communities of care that provide resources for those who have experienced sexual assault and harassment. When I wrote The Bubble We're In, I tried to make the main character, Sebastián, neither a victim nor a survivor. The event is part of him, but it's only a part of him — one he processes through community. He attends a community therapy session at a local LGBTQ+ Center, which helps him begin to heal.

It's a touching scene, but it's also increasingly a fantasy. Unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer of these spaces in modern America. Some have closed down due to the moral panic we are currently experiencing. From Texas to Florida, LGBTQ+ centers in schools all across the country have been shut down.

Others are undergoing financial problems. The Milwaukee LGBT Community Center, for example, never quite recovered from the recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The William Way LGBT Center in Philadelphia has had its funding slashed multiple times over the last year.

And listen, charities should not be seen as the ultimate solution, and not all of the people who run them are good at their jobs. I live in the Washington, D.C. area, and infamously, an LGBTQ+ Shelter here, Casa Ruby, was so mismanaged that the city cut all funding, and its owner is currently facing legal troubles for diverting funds meant for the nonprofit into her personal account.

We need to be critical of these services as well (and shut them down when they fail us), but that doesn't change the fact that something needs to fill these gaps. Our community is already strapped for cash, and many of us cannot afford the United States' expensive and overburdened mental health system. These centers are a lifeline, and many are quite threatened this pride season.

A prideful conclusion

There is a reason pride in ourselves became a rallying call within the queer community. Society immersed us in shame, and as a defense mechanism, queer activists got loud about it. As one organizer of this movement remarked in an interview with The Allusionist in 2015:

“People did not have power then; even now, we only have some. But anyone can have pride in themselves, and that would make them happier as people, and produce the movement likely to produce change.”

Yet sometimes, it feels like pride has morphed into a dangerous form of respectability politics, where we only feel proud to uplift the good parts of the community: the queers with talent, awards, money, and accolades. The times our community produces joyous art and “civil” acts of resistance—the positive experiences and nothing else.

However, part of having pride involves being comfortable with all of ourselves. If we are proud of the people we have become and are becoming, we should be allowed to talk about all the experiences that have shaped us — both the good and the bad.

I was sexually assaulted.

It happened, and I see my ability to talk about it as a means of survival and strength. I got through it because I was able to chat about it with loved ones, friends, and professionals, and I want others to have the same opportunity. We should want to make space for queers who are processing the all-too-common trauma of sexual assault and harassment, and when it comes to on-the-ground aid in our communities, the money and resources are often just not there.

This pride, in between the parades and parties, I beg you to donate to your local queer community center, LGBT sex workers coop, or any other community-run initiative working for us and by us. We are the ones that must protect each other.

Doctor Who Tried (And Failed) To Save White Supremacists — Should It Have?

Image; BBC

Doctor Who (1963—present) is about a person, well, a Time Lord, traveling through time and space. He is an adventurer who saves humans in peril from alien foes, and a typical episode can take the viewer anywhere from the distant past to contemporary Britain to our space-faring future.

In the episode Dot and Bubble (2024), he travels to the moon of FineTime — a party planet where rich socialites only have to work two hours a day and then spend the rest of their time partying in virtual reality. They do not interact with people directly; instead, they see the world through a curated chat bubble of close friends and subscribers.

There, he encounters a civilization rooted in white supremacy, and we are left wondering if they are even worth saving.

The racism of FineTime

To the keen observer, you recognize the white supremacy of this society almost immediately. Everyone there is white. Characters are surrounded by images of their friends at all times, and there is not a single person of color in sight.

At first, one might be mistaken in believing that this is simply structural racism (i.e., when a society's systems uphold racism, irrespective of the opinions of any one individual). The main character for the episode, Lindy Pepper-Bean (Callie Cooke), makes it quite clear that only rich people are allowed on FineTime. Wealthy people are often white, especially when portrayed in media, and so if you are the type of person who is not unsettled by default white spaces, this portrayal might not phase you at all.

Yet the racism of Lindy seeps in immediately. Her moon is secretly under attack by insect-like aliens. When the Doctor, played this season by Black and queer superstar Ncuti Gatwa, tries to help her via virtual messages, she immediately ignores him. She does not ignore, however, his white, blonde-haired companion Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), who gets a begrudging Lindy to talk to the Doctor. When she first does this, after attempting to block him multiple times, Lindy initially thinks he is a different person from the one she blocked because, unstated, all Black people look alike to her. She spends the rest of the episode disparaging the Doctor, including telling her friends that "he's not as stupid as he looks."

Her racism is stated explicitly at the end of the episode when Lindy meets the Doctor in person, and she rejects his offer of taking her and her friends off-world via his spaceship.

"We couldn't travel with you," she states coldly. "Because you, sir, are not one of us. I mean, you were kind. Although it was your duty to save me. Obviously. I mean screen-to-screen contact is just about acceptable, but in person? That's impossible."

Instead, she opts to go into the wilderness in an attempt to restart FineTime society. As one character remarks on their plan: "…we can go out there to this planet. And we can fight it and tame it and own it. We'll be pioneers. Just like our ancestors."

They are effectively attempting to restart the horror of their racist, settler-colonial society somewhere else, and as their boat embarks, my hopes for success are not with them.

The racist trolly problem

This twist is interesting because we, as the viewers, have been watching Lindy fight for survival against the alien invasion the entire episode. She serves as our point of view character and where our empathy is briefly placed. But by this moment in the episode, we are no longer rooting for her because we now know she and her entire society are rooted in a vile form of white supremacy.

And yet the Doctor pleads for her to still come with him, saying: "I don't care what you think. Okay? You can say whatever you want. You can think absolutely anything. I will do anything if you just allow me to save your lives."

They scoff at his aid, calling his vastly superior spaceship, the TARDIS, "voodoo." They then go off into the woods, where their lack of survival skills spells almost certain death for them.

On a character level, you can argue that the Doctor has a soft spot for people facing extinction. He is the last of his kind—a people that were quite imperialist in their own right. This history has colored his psychology, causing him to empathetically fight for the preservation of even the most monstrous of creatures. An earlier episode had the Doctor trying to save a murderous booger monster (see Space Babies). He is, of course, going to try to save a person whose entire species is teetering on extinction.

There is further the argument that a person engaged in rescue operations, which the Doctor is, should not pick and choose who they save. We do not ask firefighters to assess someone's ethics and morality before saving them from a fire, and there is good reason for that. It would lead to a whole lot of discarded people — though given the hierarchies embedded within our society, you can argue that that selection already happens (see I Was a Firefighter for 35 Years. Racism Today Is as Bad as Ever).

If the Doctor were to succeed here in helping the survivors of FineTime (and he does fail), I shudder to think of what future he might have helped build. Lindy has made no personal changes in the slightest. In fact, in a bid to survive the alien invasion, she kills off the only “Good White Guy” who might have been able to see past his own hierarchical thinking. If the Doctor helps Lindy and her friends survive, he will likely increase the likelihood that this white supremacist society will survive.

The episode creates a kind of racist trolly problem (i.e., in reference to a philosophical thought experiment where you are asked to choose which group of people a trolly will run over), where we are left to contemplate whether we should help those we consider despicable, even if they don't want our help. If a white supremacist is in trouble, do you try to help them, or do you let them die in the hope it builds a better world?

For the Doctor, the answer is clearly the prior, to help them, but because his aid is rejected, we are left wondering if his decision was the correct one. Given that the residents of FineTime would rather die than receive his help, you can make the strong argument that this question doesn't even matter.

A wibbly, wobbly conclusion

As Lindy's boat is departing in a desperate attempt to restart her supremacist civilization, I think of what I would have done at that moment. I am not sure I would been nearly as kind as the Doctor, and that's interesting because, in many ways, I am the future descendant of the people on that boat — at least metaphorically. My ancestors were white supremacists who "pioneered" (i.e., genocided) a land in the name of progress: a land we popularly call the United States of America.

I think of all the pain my ancestors caused: the cultures and languages lost, the lives destroyed, the environments altered for the worse.

I think of the pain we are still causing.

There is a tendency of "reformed" colonizers to over-identify with current oppressors in an attempt to "save them" from themselves. We all like to think that we can talk our racist friends, parents, or grandparents off that boat, and Doctor Who's Dot and Bubble makes clear that that's impossible.

Lindy is not going to be saved, nor does she want to be. She wants her racist society, FineTime, to live on forever, and maybe we should stop trying to save people like her.

They clearly would rather die in their own bubbles than listen.